When Sharlene E. Coburn visited the National Naval Aviation Museum bearing a large envelope of memorabilia relating to her father, Commander Vernon Thomas Moss, it did not take much looking to determine that he was both a lucky man and witness to truly pivotal moments in history.
Enlisting in the Navy in 1927, Moss entered the medical field, training as a Pharmacist’s Mate and serving at sea in
Relief (AH 1), the first U.S. Navy ship built from the keel up as a hospital ship, and
Saratoga (CV 3), the U.S. Navy’s third aircraft carrier. In 1932, he reported to Naval Air Station (NAS) Lakehurst, New Jersey, the East Coast base for the sea service’s lighter-than-air operations, including those of the rigid dirigible
Akron (ZRS 4). Assigned to the airship, Moss was aboard her during many of her flights throughout 1932 and 1933, but due to a severe ingrown toenail that prevented him from wearing a boot, he was placed on medical leave and missed
Akron’s fateful flight of April 4, 1933, that ended with the giant dirigible plunging into the Atlantic Ocean during a storm. Of the 76 men on board, only 3 survived.
Remaining in lighter-than-air, Moss transferred to the rigid airship
Macon (ZRS 5), which operated from Lakehurst and also NAS Sunnyvale, California (later renamed Moffett Field). On February 12, 1935, the airship was returning to the California base when she encountered a storm off Point Sur, California. Moss was on board as the airship, her upper fin torn away by high winds, descended towards the Pacific Ocean. “I was in the crew’s quarters up forward of [a]midships when the alarm sounded,” Moss told a reporter shortly after
Macon crashed. Upon hearing the call to abandon ship, he donned his life preserver and jumped from the airship as it began hitting the water, a drop of about 50 feet. However, as he soon discovered, his plunge into the Pacific was not necessarily a passage to safety.
“Just as I struck the [the water], the ship began to roll over toward me. I tried to pull away, but could not. Before I knew it I was sucked under. I had to fight to keep from being pushed up against the ship because of the buoyancy of the life preserver. At last—it must have been fully a minute—I came out on the other side and watched the ship sink…until the nose dropped out of sight.”
Reaching a life raft that was overloaded, Moss hung onto the side, leaving his position once to swim to one of shipmates, Machinist’s Mate Julius Majak, who was yelling for help after his life belt deflated and he became too tired to swim. Moss pulled him to safety. All but 2 members of
Macon’s crew survived the crash, which effectively spelled the end of the U.S. Navy’s rigid airship program.
Other nations continued operating dirigibles, one of them being Germany, whose
Hindenburg received international acclaim. By 1937, Pharmacist’s Mate Moss found himself once again assigned to NAS Lakehurst. On May 6, 1937, his wife Eleanor arrived at the air station to pick up her husband at the end of his duty shift. Having some time to spare she accepted an offer to watch the Hindenburg land, the airship having completed a transatlantic crossing. Instead, what she and her husband witnessed that day was the explosion of the dirigible in flames, the film shot of the event one of the most famous footage of the twentieth century.
Moss would obtain a commission and eventually retire from the Navy in 1956, but not before playing a role in history once again, receiving a commendation for World War II service in Europe during which he was the administrator for U.S. Naval Hospital Number 12 in Netley, England, a facility that beginning on the afternoon of June 6, 1944, began receiving some of the first casualties of D-Day.
The images in this article show Moss shortly after World War II and a memento he received on the occasion of the commissioning of the rigid airship Akron (ZRS 4).