The Tragedy at Honda by Charles Lockwood and Hans Christian Adamson

The worst peacetime naval disaster in U.S. history took place in September 1923, when seven destroyers were wrecked on the coast of California, just where the coast curves to the east south of Lompoc and northwest of Santa Barbara. The coast in this area has been known as a treacherous one for centuries, with many shipwrecks from Spanish colonial times and on.

The Tragedy at Honda records in great detail the engineering run that the destroyers were making from San Francisco to San Diego. They were striving to make a specific time and were operating according to "destroyer doctrine" of the time, which was essentially to follow the lead destroyer rather than each ship making its own navigational location estimates. The ships followed in tight formation, a few hundred feet from each other, and using dead reckoning at night and in foggy conditions, they underestimated where the coast turned east into the Santa Barbara channel. They steamed directly into the coast, and almost all of them were torn up on the rocks. Some had fallen behind, and these turned west after hearing the radio traffic about the wrecks ahead.

Even after wrecking, the lead captain thought that they had grounded on rocky islands 15 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, thinking he had overshot the channel.

Despite the magnitude of the damage, not many lives were lost. The survivors clambered onto the rocks, scaled the cliffs and used boats to rescue some people. The story of their night on the cliffs and subsequent rescue and trip to Los Angeles is interesting too. The book concludes with the naval investigations of the tragedy.

I'd never heard of this tragedy until we visited Santa Barbara in June 2013. A vendor at an art fair told me about the tragedy and I found the book. I finished it on 10/22/13 and will hang onto it until I find someone really interested in the story, then I'll probably give it to them.