By Scott Taylor
Earlier this month the Royal Canadian Navy took the precaution of placing two ships companies – HMCS Ville de Quebec and Moncton – into a 14 day quarantine at the Westin NovaScotian in Halifax prior to their operational deployments. While this course of action meant an additional two weeks of separation from family and friends during this stressful period of pandemic lockdown, one has to applaud the decision taken by the Navy brass.
For anyone familiar with the close confines of a modern warship it is readily apparent that any outbreak of COVID19 aboard ship would be uncontainable. With shared sleeping quarters, communal messing facilities and ablution stations there is no possibility of enforcing quarantine for infected personnel. It is also true that if they are on an operational deployment at sea, then calling in sick from work is not an option.
Our American allies are still dealing with the aftermath of one such an emergency.
In early March the USS Theodore Roosevelt – a nuclear powered aircraft carrier – had a five-day port call in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang. Although the COVID19 outbreak in Vietnam at that time was still minimal, several of the U.S. sailors stayed at a hotel in Da Nang in which two fellow guests were British tourists who had been infected with the virus.
Once the Roosevelt was back out to sea several sailors reported flu like symptoms. By 24 March testing concluded that the COVID19 was indeed aboard the carrier, putting its nearly 5,000 crew members at risk. Senior navy officials were indecisive as to what course of action to take. This prompted the Captain of the Roosevelt to send out an email with an attached memo to 10 of his superior officers and fellow captains. The contents of the memo were leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle and published the following day.
In pleading for the immediate removal of 90 per cent of his crew to nearby Guam for their own safety, Captain Brett Crozier wrote “We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily.”
The revelation that the ship was stricken with the spread of a deadly virus caused embarrassment for the senior navy officials who appeared to have been paralyzed into inactivity while their own sailors remained in peril.
While Crozier’s memo did galvanize the start of an evacuation of the majority of the Roosevelt crew, the embarrassment its release to the media caused led the acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly to remove Crozier from command. This knee-jerk relieving Crozier of command received support from President Donald Trump. “I thought it was terrible, what [Crozier] did to write a letter. I mean this isn’t a class on literature,” Trump told reporters.
Video footage of the dismissed Crozier exiting the Roosevelt to the spontaneous applause of his grateful crew quickly went viral.
Obviously Modly did not see the videos or else he read the tea leaves wrong when he decided to double down on Crozier’s alleged disloyalty.
After flying all the way to Guam, Modly boarded the carrier and addressed the Roosevelt’s crew over the ship’s loudspeaker. In a 15 minute tirade that was laced with profanity Modly accused Crozier of having leaked his own memo to the media. In Modly’s estimation, Crozier was “too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this.”
Recordings of Modly’s rant soon went public and in the wake of the angry public backlash which his words had generated, the acting Secretary resigned the following day.
For his part Captain Crozier remains in quarantined isolation in Guam as he was one of over 655 crewmembers to contract COVID19 aboard the Roosevelt. At time of writing, one U.S. Sailor had died from this outbreak.
One has to hope that in the wake of all this Crozier will be reinstated as the Captain of the Roosevelt.
There is a lesson the RCN can learn from this incident and that is that since we are not at war and the virus is real, the safety of our sailors must take priority over operational duties.
