By James Heinz
You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Your next stop…
Bay City, Michigan
In 2012 the retired U.S. Navy destroyer USS EDSON DD-946 arrived in Bay City to become the primary attraction of the Saginaw Valley Naval Ship Museum. The ship served in Vietnam but it also has another distinction.
It starred in an episode of the original Twilight Zone TV series.
The episode is entitled “The Thirty Fathom Grave”. It aired January 10, 1963. In the episode, a current day U.S. Navy destroyer detects a tapping sound coming from the bottom of the sea. A diver finds a sunken World War II U.S. submarine on the bottom. One of the destroyer’s crew members was the sole survivor of the sunken sub. He becomes convinced that the tapping sounds are his dead shipmates calling for him to join them, and eventually he jumps overboard to join them.
The interior shots for the episode were filmed aboard the USS EDSON. The episode can be viewed on the internet, and is apparently shown on the ship.
This and photo at top of page: EDSON at Montreal in 1983 courtesy of Navsource.net
EDSON is a Forest Sherman class destroyer and was launched in 1958 at the Bath Iron Works in Maine. She was named after Major General Merrit Edson, one of the legends of the Marine Corps, who did not receive multiple Medals of Honor during World War II only because of a rule saying no one can receive the Medal more than once.
EDSON displaces 4,050 tons fully loaded. She is 418 feet long, 45 feet wide, and draws 22 feet of water. Her 4 boilers drove two steam turbines and their propellers to a maximum speed of 35 knots. She had a crew of 17 officers and 218 enlisted men. EDSON was the last all gun destroyer built for the U.S. Navy. She carried three 5 inch guns, four 3 inch guns, and six torpedo tubes.
She carried out routine peacetime activities until 1964, when she deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin on a fire support mission shelling shore targets in Vietnam. She was struck by North Vietnamese shore battery fire in 1967 and in 1968 she was bombed by the U.S. Air Force, although there is no mention of casualties in either incident. She also participated in the evacuations of Phnom Penh and Saigon in 1975.
WMHS files show that EDSON visited the Great Lakes in 1983.
EDSON off Detroit, no date, courtesy of Navsource.net
EDSON was decommissioned in 1988. From 1989 to 2004 she was a museum ship in New York harbor and was then returned to the Navy. The Saginaw Valley museum outbid Sheboygan, Wis., for the rights to display the vessel, and in 2012 she was towed to Bay City.
Bay City has another connection to the world of entertainment: the pop singer Madonna was born there.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
