Recently during my summer
internship with the Gibson House, archiving a collection of family manuscripts,
I was surprised to discover evidence of yet another Gibson family member death
at sea, that of Lieutenant Warren Winslow, the twenty-five-year-old son of
Rosamond Gibson Winslow (“Little” Ros). (An earlier GHM blog post covered the
death of John Gardiner Gibson, Jr. aboard the Lyonnais; see “History Repeats Itself,” January 1, 2015.) Lt.
Winslow, a Harvard graduate called to service when he was attending Harvard Law
School, was one of the 139 sailors lost when the USS Turner, a naval destroyer, sank to the ocean floor just a few
miles northeast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, on January 3, 1944.
A series of explosions aboard
ship that morning completely wrecked the vessel and started fires that could
not be effectively controlled. While the navy later could not determine the
exact cause of the first explosion, an investigation turned up no evidence of
enemy action or sabotage. The official report could only suggest that stored
ammunition on board had something to do with the incident, as the first
explosion occurred in an area containing ammunition meant for transfer later
that day.
After a sixteen-day voyage on the
Atlantic, the USS Turner had anchored
a few miles off of Sandy Hook early on the morning of the third and had begun
preparations to sail for Gravesend Bay, New York, to transfer its cargo of
ammunition to Fort Lafayette in Brooklyn. The sky was overcast and snow was
falling in the area. Nearby were other naval vessels, including the USS Stevenson and USS Thorn, which maintained a continuous underwater sound search.
These sonar sweeps detected no enemy craft in the area.So it came as a complete shock when, at about 6:17 a.m., a violent explosion rocked the USS Turner.
