The technology derived from the economic competition of the Cold War is really
quite amazing, from occupied stations a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle to placing a
human on the moon, the era really did drive the boundaries of technology and humanity,
but not every experiment was a success, and sometimes those victims of the war,
that was not a war, are too easily forgotten. The 28 men who died in the
collapse of Texas Tower 4 on January 15, 1961, deserved to be remembered.
After 1953 the air defense strategy of the United States was driven by a military policy
of the Eisenhower administration called “The New-Look”, this attempt to balance Cold War
military commitments with the nation's financial resources changed the focus of air defense from
attempting to protect the nation from attack, to providing enough warning to preserve our nuclear
attack capability, counting on the doctrine of massive retaliation to deter any attack. This was
grounded in the reality of the Nuclear Age, the former strategy of planning to intercept bombers
became essentially futile, as even if we could effectively destroy 99% of an incoming attack, the
power of hydrogen bombs meant that an attack would still be devastating. The goal then was to provide
our Strategic Air Command with enough warning to allow us to preserve our strategic bombers for
retaliatory strike. There was therefore a focus on creating a comprehensive early warning strategy,
with significant focus on filling gaps in radar coverage that might be exploited in an incoming
attack on the United States. Over the course of the 1950s, the US and Canada jointly worked on
a series of land-based installations that would eventually create a multi-layered system of the
Pine Tree Line, the Mid Canada Line and the Distant Early Warning Line. The development
of these systems required massive effort and each is an engineering marvel in itself. But the lines
still included numerous gaps that were expected to be filled via a number of different systems,
one of the most extraordinary of those ideas was proposed in a report by MIT’s Lincoln
Laboratory in 1952. The report considered the possibility of extending radar coverage,
by building platforms in the Atlantic using offshore drilling technology. They concluded
that a set of such platforms equipped with radars, could extend coverage several hundred
miles offshore, giving half-an-hour additional warning of a bombing attack. In January of 1954
funding for five towers was approved with the goal of providing an interlocking early warning
perimeter stretching from Nova Scotia to New Jersey. Because the platforms would resemble
the offshore oil platforms that could be seen in the Gulf of Mexico, they were called Texas Towers.
This was quite an engineering challenge, these towers would be substantially larger and placed
in substantially deeper water than any oil platform that was operating in that day,
and they would be placed in the storm swept North Atlantic. Originally five towers were planned but
only three were completed, towers two, three and four. The towers had to be sizable to fit
the radar equipment, the platform was a triangle approximately 200 feet per side and included more
than six thousand tons of steel and they would be anchored deep. Tower 4 was sent approximately
185 feet of water, deep sea oil platforms go much deeper than that today but in 1954 most
oil platforms operated in 20 to 40 feet of water. There worked a difficult balance trying to present
minimum resistance to waves yet able to withstand hurricane force storms. Because of their size and
the rough seas where they were to be located, they could not be constructed on site instead
they were jack up rigs, their water type floating hulls were built in shipyards and towed to their
location where the legs were lowered and the platform raised to its regular height of 83 feet
above mean load tide using hydraulic jacks. This created the historical novelty of being the first
Air Force stations to be christened and launched from a shipyard. Towers 2 & 3 were built at the
Fore River shipyard in Quincy Massachusetts, they raised a slight difficulty as the platform had to
fit through the gap on the raised Fore River Bridge where clearance was less than two and a
half feet on either side of the platform. Once constructed each tower included a large search
radar and two large height fiber radars each enclosed in a neoprene radome to protect them from
the weather and three antenna for communications. The first completed was Texas Tower 2 about a
hundred miles east of Cape Cod Massachusetts in December of 1955. Tower 3, 50 miles southeast
of Nantucket Massachusetts, became operational in November of 1956. The final tower, tower 4,
placed 65 miles southwest of Long Island New York became operational in 1958. Of course the Russians
were highly interested in the towers, it was not uncommon to see periscopes from Russian
submarines, Russian trawlers purportedly merchant vessels but probably spy vessels spent so much
time circling the towers that one of the airmen said that at night there were so many lights
you thought you were at Coney Island. Rumors spread that the Russians were sneaking on to the
platforms at night. The towers were essentially self-contained floating bases. Texas towers
contain bunk rooms, recreational facilities, a library and a dining hall. But life of the 60 to
100 crews stationed aboard the platforms was not easy, it would have been easy enough and isolated
in cramped quarters to get what they call “Tower Fever”. The work could be difficult, supply could
only be transferred when the currents cooperated, meaning that airmen would be manhandling heavy
debt cargo in the middle of the night, something sailors would usually avoid. But the station's
were also seemingly always rocked with noise, not just from station operations but from the sound
transferred up the legs that were anchored to the ocean bottom. They mounted the world's loudest
foghorns which on a foggy day would blow every 29 seconds. In the North Atlantic, fog was common,
the Tower 2 foghorn once had to be used for three weeks straight. Crews rotated in every four weeks,
found that when they got home, they couldn't sleep without noise. As a sign of the quality of life of
the towers Air Force personnel referred to them as “The Iron Bastards” But perhaps the worst of
all was the constant motion that was caused by the waves, Tower 2 is said to have a sort of
jogging motion, Tower 3 was a twister, Tower 4 in the deepest water was the worst of all,
bobbing and weaving so much that the crews referred to Tower 4 as “Old Shaky”.
And that was a warning sign for troubled Tower 4, in June of 1947 as Tower 4 was
being towed, two structural supports were torn off and lost in rough seas, after the tower
was placed the Air Force decided to install the radar before the supports were fixed,
that affected the stability of the station. Tower 4 was in by far the deepest water, over 180 feet,
more than three times the 56 feet of the water which tower 2 was anchored. There was no precedent
at the time for anchoring a platform so deep. Then in September of 1960 Tower 4 was battered by the
50-foot waves and 134 mile winds of Hurricane Donna, a hurricane so powerful that it killed
364 people and caused 900 million dollars in damage. The tower sustained enough damage that
it was reduced to a skeleton crew of 14 Air Force personnel and 14 contractors until repairs could
be made. They tried to stabilize the tower by filling the legs with sand and concrete,
the tower couldn't be abandoned for fear the Russians might capture its sensitive radar
equipment. In January of 1961 a strong winter storm with wind speeds up to 80 miles per hour
and waves up to 40 feet tall battered the already damaged Texas Tower 4. On January 14th 1961,
US Coast Guard lieutenant Paul Yost recalled, “I remember going to sleep that night with the
wind just howling and telling my wife I hope we don't get a call tonight.” But he and the
crew of the 125-foot active class US Coast Guard patrol boat Agassiz did get a call,
an emergency call to try to rescue the 24 men aboard Texas tower 4. The Coast Guard has been
raced through the gale of it on the 15th, their motto; semper paratus, always ready. The winds
were too high to attempt a rescue by helicopter, at 6 p.m. the Agassi was still more than two hours
out when the tower radioed “We are breaking up”. They were still an hour away at approximately 7:30
p.m. when Tower 4 disappeared from radar. The platform had disintegrated and collapsed into
the sea, all 28 of the personnel on the tower died, only two of the bodies were recovered.
It was eventually revealed that the Air Force had already decided to decommission the program
before the collapse of Tower 4, the advent of nuclear missiles which move much faster than
bombers meant that the towers went from adding about an extra half-hour of early warning to
just 60 seconds. That revelation made the deaths aboard Texas Tower 4 seemed all the more futile.
The Air Force did add emergency escape watches to towers 2 and 3 so the crews could get off quickly,
but by 1963 those two towers were also decommissioned. Tower 3 was salvaged but
Tower 2 was unsalvageable and was demolished on site. After a review board determined that
the collapse of Texas tower 4 was due to human error, a colonel who is the acting commander of
the Boston air defense sector was charged with involuntary manslaughter and two other officers
were charged with dereliction of duty. The colonel was acquitted in a court-martial and the charges
against the other officers were dropped. In 2003 a study of the collapse of Texas tower four did
fall organisational failings but essentially determined that we lacked the technology at the
time to predict the dynamic effects of the towers design. The study concluded that using modern
technology we could have saved Texas Tower 4. The families of the victims of the collapse of Texas
Tower four formed the Texas Tower Association and for many years sought official recognition
of their family sacrifice from government. That recognition finally came in February of
2011 when President Obama sent a letter to the Association. Donald Abbot who was the son of
Dave Abbot, a welder who died in the collapse, was quoted in the New York Times after receiving the
president's letter “There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about my father. we were pals”
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