The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

reporting for duty at Camp Wilson. Red bristled at the question but played it cool. He patiently explained that his men had been awake for almost two days and were in no condition to dive. They would get a decent night’s sleep and report for duty the next day. Page backed off quickly and offered to arrange a bus for the divers in the morning. Moody accepted.

On Tuesday, January 25, Red Moody, eleven divers, and about 14,000 pounds of diving gear arrived at Camp Wilson to join the growing Navy contingent. Four U.S. Navy minesweepers, an oceanographic ship, and a destroyer already sailed offshore, with a handful of tankers, tugs, and other ships on the way. A small team of EOD divers from Rota, led by Lieutenant Oliver Andersen, was setting up shop on the beach when Moody’s team joined them. A young ensign followed on Moody’s heels. “His sole purpose in life,” recalled Andersen, “was to follow behind Red and write down everything that was happening.” Andersen, curious, asked the kid for his notebook and flipped through it. “Closer we get to the scene,” the ensign had written, “the more outstanding the confusion.”

Moody spoke with an Air Force colonel to get a rundown of the situation. Afterward, Moody and Andersen talked for a few minutes, sharing what little information they had. Then Moody made an announcement: he was heading out — uninvited — to the USS Macdonough, the admiral’s flagship, to see what the Navy brass could tell him. Commandeering an inflatable seven-man rubber boat, he left Andersen in charge of his divers and puttered out into the waves.

DeWitt “Red” Moody was a tall, fit, broad-shouldered man with a commanding presence and a thick Texas accent. Everyone called him “Red” because he had once sported a full head of copper-colored hair. Now, at age thirty-eight, most of his hair was long gone, his forehead rising high and bald as a bullet above his face. The nickname, however, had stuck.

Moody was a freshman in high school when the United States entered World War II, too young to join the military. He waited, impatiently, and then enlisted in the Navy in 1944, the day after his seventeenth birthday. He went to sonar school and served in the Pacific on the USS Strong but saw little action. When the war ended, he decided to stay in the Navy. He came from a broken family with little money, and the Navy offered him a camaraderie and security he had never experienced before. Stationed on an aircraft carrier, he met some Navy EOD divers and saw them at work. The men impressed him with their teamwork and “can-do” attitude. He decided that diving was the job for him.

EOD divers are a special breed. The job throws them into dirty, difficult situations with no obvious solution. They must solve problems in a limited amount of time — before their air runs out or something explodes — so they get used to working quickly with improvised tools. Because divers need to make snap decisions, the relationship between officers and enlisted men differs from that in other parts of the Navy. Divers speak out, show little deference, and are willing to accept ideas from the lowest man on the totem pole.

Moody excelled in this world. EOD diving became his life. After eleven years, he earned an officer’s commission, one of the rare “mustang” officers in the Navy who had risen from the ranks of the enlisted. At the time of the Palomares crash, he was overseeing a team of forty-seven at his headquarters in Charleston. When an accident happened, Moody usually dispatched a three-man team to cover it. Sometimes, after a high-profile accident, he sent a larger team and went along himself. This was one of those occasions.

Red Moody steered his rubber boat alongside the Macdonough, chuckling to himself as he wondered what the sailors on the destroyer thought of his tiny raft bobbing in the waves. Moody jumped on board, introduced himself to the deck officer, and asked to speak with Admiral Guest. But the ship’s executive officer had left word: anybody coming to see the admiral had to go through him first. The deck officer sent a messenger off to find the XO while Moody cooled his heels. After some time the messenger returned, empty- handed.

The deck officer started to send the messenger off in another direction when Moody spoke up. “I’ve been waiting here for quite a while,” he said. “I’ll just go with him.” No, no, no, said the deck officer. Bad idea. You really ought to wait here. But Red Moody was done waiting. “You tell the exec where I am if you find him,” he said and took off with the messenger. A few minutes later, the two men were climbing the ladder by the wardroom — the officers’ mess. Moody suspected that Admiral Guest might be inside. He told the messenger to go on ahead. “You go find the XO,” he said. “I’ll be in here.”

Moody slipped into the wardroom and saw a clutch of Navy officers, including Admiral Guest, huddled over a secret message from Washington. He moved closer to listen to the discussion. The message listed various pieces of gear that were being sent to aid the search. There was something called OBSS — ocean bottom scanning sonar — a Decca navigation system, and a couple of underwater vehicles. All the gear was familiar to Moody. In fact, it had been destined for a diving mission in the Gulf of Mexico, where one of Moody’s teams needed it to recover a Bullpup missile from the Air Force test range off Elgin Air Force Base. But the Navy had diverted the equipment to the more critical mission in Spain. After listening for a few minutes to the officers puzzling over this list of strange machines, Moody realized that they didn’t know much.

He piped up. “Excuse me,” he said, “but that equipment was actually slated for one of my operations down in the Gulf of Mexico.” As the group grew silent, Moody explained what each piece of equipment did, how it worked, and what to use it for. He stayed for lunch. Then, around 2 p.m., he asked permission to leave. Permission was granted. Red Moody jumped into his little rubber boat and went away.

The next day, Admiral Guest paid a visit to Camp Wilson. The admiral approached the beach in a small barge, which couldn’t land on shore. Moody sent a rubber boat to pick up the admiral and bring him to the beach. Admiral Guest hit the sand and greeted Moody. “Did you get my message?” he asked. “You’re now on my staff.” Moody hadn’t received any such message but told the admiral he was up for the job. Great, said Admiral Guest. When will you be ready? Now, said Moody.

Admiral Guest looked at the diver, surprised. “What about your gear?” he asked. “I got people can get my gear for me, Admiral. If you want my services, you got it.” Admiral Guest was headed to a briefing with General Wilson and asked Moody to go along. Red dropped everything and joined him. From that day on, Moody remained close to the admiral. “We seemed to have a special affinity for each other, because he knew I was ready to go,” Moody said.

“He also knew I would not BS him. I would tell him the way I thought it was.” Guest needed all the help he could get. He had been thrown into this operation just a few days earlier — yanked from his post in Naples by an early-morning phone call — and was still trying to get the lay of the land. Guest was a no-nonsense man, hardworking, heavy-smoking, and blunt. He demanded full dedication from his staff and had little patience for slackers. A small man, he was known to some as “Little Bulldog,” less for his growl than for his tenacious grip.

Guest came from a long line of military men, most of whom had served in the U.S. Army cavalry.

When Guest received an appointment to the Naval Academy rather than West Point, his father devised a scheme by which the young officer could transfer to the Army after graduation to carry on the family tradition. Guest, who had fallen in love with the Navy, refused his father’s offer. The elder Guest, a wealthy man, told his stubborn son that if he stayed in the Navy, he would disinherit him.

Admiral Guest thought it over and refused the offer again. His father stayed true to his word; according to family lore, the two men did not speak again. When Guest’s father died, he left his son one dollar.

During World War II, Guest flew a dive-bomber in the Pacific and achieved a spectacular fighting record. He was the first carrier-based aviator to sink an enemy ship in that war, a feat that won him the Navy Cross, the second highest honor in the Navy. (The only higher award is the Medal of Honor.) During the rest of his service in World War II, Guest won the Air Medal, a Gold Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star. The Navy also awarded him several Purple Hearts, which he never wore. After the war, he climbed the Navy hierarchy, becoming a rear admiral in 1962.

In Palomares, Guest hit the ground running, establishing a high-probability search area on the day he arrived, January 24. At the time, he already knew about the Spanish fishermen. But he also knew that the Air Force had found three bombs on land and that Navy divers and minesweepers were picking up debris and sonar hits near shore. It seemed clear that if bomb number four had fallen into the water, it had landed either in the area described by Simo and Roldan or in the shallow debris field adjacent to the beach.

However, at this early stage in the game, Guest couldn’t afford to leave anything out. On a map, Guest found the point where the fishermen had plucked Larry Messinger from the sea. Guest knew that Messinger had opened his parachute immediately after ejection. If the bomb had done the same, he reasoned, it probably wouldn’t have floated much farther than the airman. From Messinger’s landing point, he drew two straight lines to shore, one reaching far north of Palomares, the other far south. This created a triangular-shaped search area encompassing