They Knew: Asbestos and the Navy
They Knew: Asbestos and the Navy
The men who painted, insulated, and maintained the Navy's ships were told — when they were told anything — that nobody knew. The record says otherwise, and the record is dated. Asbestos disease was in the medical literature before these men were born, in a U.S. government bulletin before their fathers' generation shipped out, and in a survey of naval pipecovering published in 1946. What follows is the timeline, entry by entry, each with its source.
The timeline
1918 — The government’s own bulletin. Frederick L. Hoffman, statistician for the Prudential, publishes U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin 231 on mortality in the dusty trades: asbestos workers showed unusually high early mortality, and insurers were already refusing or restricting life coverage for them. The industry that sold insurance had priced the risk before the First World War ended.
1924–1927 — The disease gets a name. The first asbestos death reported in the medical literature is that of Nellie Kershaw, a Rochdale textile worker (1924). In 1927 Dr. W. E. Cooke publishes “Pulmonary asbestosis” in the British Medical Journal. Asbestosis has a name and a literature before 1930.
1930 — Merewether & Price. The UK HM Inspectorate of Factories publishes the Merewether & Price Report: of 363 asbestos workers examined, 26.2% had pulmonary fibrosis — rising to 80.9% among those exposed twenty years or more. The report appears simultaneously in a U.S. journal (Journal of Industrial Hygiene 12, 1930) and leads directly to the UK Asbestos Industry Regulations 1931 — the world’s first asbestos workplace rules. This is more than three decades before the sailors of the Vietnam era enlisted.
1930s — The industry studies, managed. Industry-side studies — Lanza’s work for Metropolitan Life among them — document asbestosis for the manufacturers. The findings are managed, not published openly. The correspondence showing how they were managed surfaces four decades later, in 1977.
1935 — “The less said about asbestos, the better off we are.” Sumner Simpson, president of Raybestos-Manhattan, writes to Vandiver Brown, counsel for Johns-Manville, in the industry’s own hand: “I think the less said about asbestos, the better off we are.” Brown agreed that asbestosis should receive “the minimum of publicity.” The letter is written in 1935. It is produced in litigation in 1977.
1938 — The U.S. Public Health Service puts a number on it. Dreessen and colleagues survey 541 asbestos textile workers for the U.S. Public Health Service and propose a tentative exposure standard of 5 million particles per cubic foot. The federal government had a number for asbestos dust more than two decades before the Vietnam-era fleet was manned.
1946 — The Navy’s own trade, in print. Fleischer, Viles, Gade & Drinker publish “A Health Survey of Pipecovering Operations in Constructing Naval Vessels,” Journal of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology 28:9–16 — a health survey of asbestos exposure in the men building naval vessels, in the standard journal of the field, well over a decade before the sailors of the 1960s reported for duty. The Borel court would later read this survey both ways: it documented the exposure of naval pipecoverers, and its reassuring conclusion — drawn from a cohort with under ten years in the trade — understated a disease that takes decades to declare itself.
Early 1960s — The Navy compensates its own. Marr, of the Medical Department at Long Beach Naval Shipyard, publishes “Asbestos Exposure During Naval Vessel Overhaul”: shipyard insulation workers on disability compensation for asbestosis, and a death in 1962. The Navy was paying its own shipyard men for asbestos disease during the service years of the men who were then painting and maintaining its ships — without protection, and without warning.
1964 — Selikoff, in JAMA. Selikoff, Churg & Hammond publish Asbestos Exposure and Neoplasia, JAMA 188:22–26 (April 6, 1964): among 632 insulation workers, 45 lung and pleural cancer deaths against 6.6 expected, 4 mesotheliomas, and 12 asbestosis deaths. Asbestos and cancer are front-page medical knowledge from 1964 onward — throughout the years when asbestos remained standard material aboard Navy ships, and sailors painted the sleeping quarters with no respirator and no warning. None was ever given.
1973 — A federal court says it. In Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp., 493 F.2d 1076 (5th Cir. 1973), manufacturers are held strictly liable for failing to warn. The court’s finding, on a full trial record: the dangers of asbestos had been in the public domain for over thirty years — and the manufacturers had never warned the workers, and never told them the ACGIH exposure limits that existed. Read the opinion: the court itself recites the 1924 case, the 1938 Public Health Service study, the 1945 naval shipyard survey, the 1947 exposure limits, and the 1964 Selikoff study. “They knew” is not this site’s rhetoric. It is a federal court’s finding, published in 1973.
1977 — The papers come out. The Sumner Simpson papers are produced in litigation: 1930s–40s executive correspondence proving the industry knew, and chose silence. The 1935 letter above is among them.
1971–1973 — Regulation arrives, after the men leave. OSHA issues its first asbestos standard (1971–72); EPA issues the asbestos NESHAP (1973). Both postdate the February 10, 1970 discharge of the radioman whose account anchors this site. For the whole of his service — and for the whole service of the men who painted beside him — the knowledge existed, and the regulation did not reach them.
What this timeline is — and what it is not
One man’s account of that work is on this site: The Radioman — Thomas Alan Bowman Sr., who painted and maintained the sleeping quarters aboard USS Arikara (ATF-98), whose VA chart records bilateral interstitial pulmonary fibrosis with right apical honeycombing, and who died on October 31, 2026.
The discipline of this page, stated plainly: this timeline destroys the “nobody knew” excuse. It does not, by itself, prove any one man’s diagnosis. What caused a particular sailor’s lung disease is a medical question, answered by tissue and medical opinion, case by case. What cannot survive this timeline is the defense that the danger was unknowable in the years these men served. It was known. It was published. It was priced by insurers, numbered by the Public Health Service, surveyed in naval shipyards, compensated by the Navy itself, and found — by a federal court, in 1973 — to have been in the public domain for over thirty years. For a sailor building his own file, the proof is the paper the government itself kept — deck logs, ships lists, service records — and the companion hub gathers that route at Evidence at BrownWaterVet.com.
If you painted, insulated, or maintained ships — or you are the widow of a man who did — Tell Your Story. The pattern this series documents is at They Knew — The Pattern.