Hurricane Maria Resurrects Ghosts of Wars Past

Although news reports about the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria, which recently made its closest approach to Hampton Roads, frequently center upon the destructive winds and tidal flooding that such a storm can bring, this week it has come to light that there were other less-recognizable threats unleashed by the storm as it made its approach to North Carolina's Outer Banks.  On Monday, beachgoers found a barnacle-encrusted sea mine near the town of Avon on Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and another one was discovered nearly 80 miles north in Corolla, just south of the Virginia state line.

An object (above) presumed to be a sea mine was found near Avon on Cape Hatteras National Seashore on the morning of September 25, 2017, and another one was found near the town of Corolla about 80 miles north on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that same morning. They were subsequently turned over to military explosive ordnance disposal technicians.  Thankfully, the Corolla mine turned out to be a training target.  (National Park Service)

During the last century, mines have posed some of the gravest enemy threats to shipping in our home waters.  During both World Wars I and II, German submarines deployed mines along the Mid-Atlantic.  It was an effective, albeit unpredictable tactic.  The Naval History and Heritage Command is currently helping lead an effort to survey USS San Diego, which ran afoul of a suspected mine off the eastern end of Long Island on July 18, 1918. We are also approaching the 99th anniversary of the second such incident that took place during the First World War, not far off the eastern seaboard. On September 29, 1918, the battleship Minnesota (BB 22) ran into a mine only 20 miles off the coast of Delaware.

Photographed in 1911 by O.W. Waterman of Hampton, Virginia, the battleship Minnesota (BB 22) appears somewhere in Hampton Roads, flying the flag of Rear Admiral (Upper Half) Aaron Ward, Commander, Battleship Division 3, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. (Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)

Built at Newport News Shipbuilding and commissioned on March 9, 1907, just in time for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exhibition and the epic circumnavigation of the globe with the Great White Fleet that followed, the veteran of the 1914 Vera Cruz expedition was assigned to Battleship Division 4, mainly to provide practical gunnery and engineering training for the tens of thousands of new recruits the Navy was taking in during World War I.  She was sailing off the Delaware Breakwater when she struck a mine that had been deployed earlier by U-117. 

Miraculously, only three days after striking a mine off Fenwick Island on the Maryland/ Delaware border on September 29, 1918, USS Minnesota (BB 22) was safely ensconced in a dry dock at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, where the serious damage that had been inflicted by a to her bow by a German mine could be ascertained.  She would remain there for five months. (Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph) 

Despite sustaining heavy flooding to her bow, there were no casualties and the battleship was able to make it to Philadelphia under her own power.  She would remain at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard for five months, during which time the war ended.  In January 1919, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels visited the battleship and personally commended 27 crew members for their "courage and efficiency." After leaving Philadelphia, Minnesota would do her part bringing thousands of American soldiers home from Europe. 

Several thousand troops from Brig. Gen. Douglas MacArthur's celebrated "Rainbow Division" (42nd Infantry Division, U.S. Army National Guard), crowd the decks of USS Minnesota (BB 22) upon their return to New York from France in 1919. (Donation of Dr. Mark Kulikowski, Naval History and Heritage Command photograph)

The Minnesota incident of 99 years ago ended happily, but it stands out as the exception and not the rule in the long, violent history of what was originally called the "torpedo" by its inventors during the American Civil War. Although enemy mines did the worst damage to American vessels during both Twentieth Century wars, not to mention in the Middle East during the latter part of the century, it should not be forgotten that American-made mines were also deployed in large numbers along our coasts, particularly during the Second World War.  Although intended to protect American merchant vessels and warships from the enemy submarine threat, they too caused damage to American shipping when merchant vessels strayed off course or their captains and pilots did not possess the latest information.  

While waiting for a harbor pilot to arrive on the "dark and stormy night" of February 16, 1942, the one-year-old, 554 foot-long tanker SS E.H. Blum of the Atlantic Refining Company, described as "one of the largest and finest tankers in the world" in the War Record of the Fifth Naval District, was ripped in two after drifting into a Navy minefield only 950 yards off the Cape Henry lighthouse.  On June 11, the SS F.W. Abrams of the Standard Oil Company "through a combination of unfortunate circumstances which included bad weather, a misconception of escort duties, and lack of proper navigational information, strayed into the Hatteras Mine Field and was eventually lost."  

Just three days later, on June 15, two American ships and one British vessel ran into a German minefield within sight of Virginia Beach that had been set by U-701, killing 17 on the British vessel, HMT Kingston Ceylonite, and one on SS Robert C. Tuttle.   

The heavily damaged Esso tanker SS Robert C. Tuttle appears in dry dock at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in July 1942.  After preliminary repairs, she was towed to Newport News for completion. (Naval History and Heritage Command photograph)

Despite a concerted effort to sweep the area for German mines, SS Santore encountered another of U-701's mines while assembling to leave Hampton Roads in Convoy KS-511 on June 17, listed to port, and quickly sank, taking three crew members with her.  

Before the month was over, the 7,256-ton Norwegian passenger-cargo vessel MV Tamesis became the second ship sunk by the "friendly Hatteras Mine Field."  The American tug Keshena became its third victim on July 19 while attending to the Panamanian-flagged J.A. Mowinckel, that had itself been damaged by torpedoes and mines.  Three were killed in the tug's engine room.

Whether the mines that emerged from the depths off North Carolina this week present a renewed threat from a past war has yet to be ascertained, but one thing is for certain: the story of mines off the East Coast is far from over.  

100 Years Ago: One Ship, 43 Dead, Three Medals of Honor, One Court Martial, and Few Answers

USS Tennessee, after the installation of a cage mast and before her renaming as USS Memphis in May 1916. (Detroit Publishing Company Collection/ Library of Congress) 

By all accounts, the morning of Tuesday, August 29, 1916 was uneventful for the roughly 1,000 men assigned to the armored cruiser Memphis (CA-10) as they went about their normal duties while anchored in roughly 45 feet of water half a mile off Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. According to the deck log of the gunboat Castine (PG-6), anchored nearby, the day opened with blue skies, light winds, and barometer readings hovering around 30 inches.

That afternoon, however, swells began coming in from the south and Captain Edward Latimer Beach, commanding officer of the Memphis, ordered that preparations be made for leaving the harbor. Only two of her 16 boilers were lighted at the time the order was passed, so the expected time for getting underway would have been approximately 4:35 pm.  By 4:20, however, waves were breaking completely over the decks of the 502 foot-long vessel, water began pouring through her ventilators into the engineering spaces, and she began dragging her anchor as ever larger waves drove her inexorably closer to the rocky shore.  At 4:23, her keel began striking bottom in the troughs of waves that at their peak reached between 70 and 80 feet high.  

Huge waves dwarf the 212 foot-long gunboat Castine as she makes her escape from Santo Domingo.  From the album of Francis Sargent, courtesy of Cmdr. John Condon, 1986.  (Naval History and Heritage Command Image via Navsource)

As the largest of the waves swept over the cruiser, seawater began pouring directly down her four funnels, 70 feet above her waterline. The boilers that had been lit began exploding, filling the engineering spaces with deadly steam just as seawater rapidly poured in from the ventilation tubes above and welled up from the crumpled bottom of the ship below.  Chief Machinist’s Mate George W. Rudd died at his post in the cruiser’s port engine room, while Lieutenant (later rear admiral upper-half) Claud A. Jones and Machinist Charles Willey were also awarded the nation’s highest honor for their heroic actions that day.  During all this, a motor launch that had been dispatched from Memphis to the port to pick up crew members who had finished playing a baseball game ashore was also swept away.  All aboard were lost, among the 43 Sailors lost that day.  Over 200 were injured.  Despite suffering heavy damage, the gunboat Castine had managed to get underway just after 4 pm.
 

USS Memphis (CA-10) on the rocks at Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  She lost more than three-dozen crewmen as she was driven ashore by a succession of huge waves and was battered beyond reasonable prospect of repair.  Left where she lay, the wreck of USS Memphis was sold in 1922, but was not actually broken up until 1938. (Naval History and Heritage Command image via Flickr)

Then and now, many descriptions of the event still describe a tsunami as being what wrecked USS Memphis that day. This is in large part due to the efforts of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., the celebrated author of Run Silent, Run Deep, one of the best-selling memoirs of World War II.  His book about the loss of the Memphis, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the catastrophe in 1966, made it abundantly clear that his father could not have affected the outcome of the loss for which he was court martialed. Beach’s book and other articles he wrote about the event not only kept the memory of the ship’s loss and the sacrifices and heroics of her crew alive, but it kept that memory framed in a specific way.

In 1993, he wrote in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings:

On the afternoon of 29 August 1916 she was riding quietly at anchor in Santo Domingo Harbor in the Dominican Republic. Some of her crew were ashore playing baseball, and a motor launch had just been sent to the recreation field to return them to the ship. At that moment, somewhere on the floor of the Caribbean Sea, there occurred a far-distant earthquake. Without the slightest warning, a tsunami rose abruptly from the peaceful sea. Heavy rollers began heading shoreward.

Later in the same article, Beach added:

The loss of his ship and 43 members of his crew was intensely personal to Dad. He had simply been unable to get up enough steam to get out of Santo Domingo Harbor. A week earlier, when a tropical storm blew up, he had got extra boilers on the line, and the ship under way, in 45 minutes—excellent time from a standing start for a coal-burning warship. But on 29 August he did not have 45 minutes; nor was it a tropical storm.

Following this line of reasoning, the court of inquiry that convened in September 1916 should have arrived at the conclusion that Capt. Beach could have not foreseen this calamity and could not have ordered measures that could have saved the 14,000-ton vessel. Instead, he was convicted at a general court martial in December of, among other things, being “culpably inefficient in the performance of his duty,” and was sentenced to lose 20 places in the captains’ seniority list.  Despite this, the prevailing sense among the higher echelons of the Navy Department's leadership must have been that the loss of the Memphis and the deaths of 43 Sailors was something that could not have been prevented, because Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels overruled the sentence handed down by the tribunal, reducing Beach’s place in line for flag rank to only five places behind where he had been before the incident.

Then, as now, earthquakes were pretty common in the Caribbean, and assuming that one had caused the loss of the Memphis and heavy damage to the Castine would have been reasonable in the immediate wake of the incident.  Nevertheless, the court of inquiry considered this as only one in a range of possible sources for the devastating waves, including tropical storms.  A report on a devastating 1918 earthquake and tsunami in Puerto Rico given by the United States Earthquake Investigation Commission to the House of Representatives in 1919 divulged that monitors in Puerto Rico recorded earthquakes originating in the vicinity of Santo Domingo on April 24 and November 29, 1916, but none during August.  Moreover, seismic monitors in Puerto Rico recorded nothing across the Caribbean between August 11 and October 2 of that year.

Despite sources that continue to suggest that an earthquake caused the waves that destroyed the Memphis, the past is not set in stone, and researchers have come forward since that time to make a persuasive case that the confluence of two passing hurricanes created a series of rogue waves that battered the southern coastline of Hispaniola and doomed USS Memphis. House Resolution 306, passed on June 15, 2015 in preparation for the centennial of the ship's loss, listed its cause as "a highly unusual 75-foot wave event that threw the ship upon the shore of Santo Domingo, resulting in its total destruction…"

Aside from the tragedy itself, which most accounts cast as a 90-minute catastrophe emerging literally from out of the blue, why were the Memphis and Castine at Santo Domingo on that fateful afternoon to begin with? As it turns out, they were ordered to the Dominican Republic on a mission deeply intertwined in a man-made political storm a decade in the making.  With a lead time stretching over months, if not years, the destructive waves of armed conflict breaking out across the country during the summer of 1916 were nearly as unanticipated as the massive waves that broke upon the country’s southern shore the afternoon of August 29.

The public jubilation over the short, successful Spanish-American War in 1898 had by 1902 muted considerably, particularly in the wake of the Philippine insurrection against American rule. As a result, an anti-imperialist coalition in Congress virtually ensured that President Theodore Roosevelt would never secure sufficient support for the establishment of more “protectorates” such as Cuba and Panama, which were bound by treaty obligations to be protected by the United States from internal and external threats. Nevertheless, European powers were threatening to mount punitive expeditions against other countries in close proximity to America that had defaulted on loans.

The Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-03, during which British and German warships blockaded the country, resulting in a showdown with the American fleet, prompted Roosevelt to establish his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which dictated that the United States would act as an “international police power” in the event that European powers once again threatened military intervention to extract concessions over outstanding debt.  Seeking to preserve American hegemony over the hemisphere, Roosevelt undertook a novel approach that would accomplish his political objectives without running afoul of the Congress. The Dominican Republic became the Roosevelt Administration’s first big test case.

In her book Financial Missionaries to the World (2003), Emily S. Rosenberg wrote, “The Dominican model became the first major effort to forge the kind of partnership that would continue to be at the heart of dollar diplomacy: a triangular relationship among financial advisors wishing to practice their new profession of fiscal rehabilitation of foreign countries; investment bankers seeking higher interest rates in foreign markets; and activist governmental officials eager to assert international influence.”

From 1904 to 1907, diplomats worked with bankers and financial advisors, mainly bureaucrats with experience in colonial administration, to forge an agreement of administrative supervision over the Dominican economy, primarily through control over customs collection, in exchange for American loans. Although the rationale for such an arrangement was explicitly nonmilitary in nature, Commander Albert C. Dillingham (who as a rear admiral would take on the task of establishing Naval Station Norfolk in 1917) also served as a prominent liaison between Secretary of State John Hay and the Dominican government as an agreement began to take shape.

Despite objections from senators who chafed at President Roosevelt’s unilateral declaration of a “fiscal protectorate” in the Dominican Republic, the Roosevelt and Taft administrations declared victory and plunged headlong into establishing similar contractual arrangements with Nicaragua, Haiti, and Liberia.  American investment banks, with the support of the American government, were dealing with bankrupt nations the way they had once dealt with failing businesses.  The shortcomings of this approach, however, invariably committed the U.S. Military to stabilizing the situation, sooner or later.  



As the customs receivership in the Dominican Republic matured, the relationship between the American and Dominican governments under the administration of Woodrow Wilson began to resemble an older colonial model. “President Roosevelt entered the Dominican relationship with the idea that a receivership would prevent, not be a prelude to, military involvement there,” wrote Rosenberg. “If the receivership was threatened by debt or disorder, so much prestige was at stake that policymakers had little choice but to bite off more and more of the country’s sovereignty, intervening in ever broader ways to address the problems.”  This erosion of the Dominican government’s sovereignty to American advisors, investment bankers and government officials eroded the legitimacy of President Ramon Caceres’ administration in the minds of many Dominicans.  After his assassination in November 1911, years of political instability followed, and, as would also happen in Haiti and Nicaragua, U.S. Marines were brought in to reestablish order, and, ultimately, new governments, with the support of vessels such as USS Memphis and Castine.

USS Memphis, sent to the Dominican Republic to help quell a political storm far away from the government officials and investment bankers who helped create it, and wrecked by waves generated by hurricanes far over the horizon, was not only one of the largest commissioned vessels our Navy ever lost to natural causes.  For decades, her forlorn, battered hull remained a fixture of Santo Domingo’s oceanfront, a dramatic symbol of the American intervention in the Dominican Republic, outlasting the era of the American foreign policy approach that sent her there.

A sunset view of Santo Domingo taken in 1924.  (Republica Dominicana via Flickr)

 

55 Years Ago: Hurricane Donna Attacks Hampton Roads

The civilian tug Virginian lies wrecked along the waterfront of Naval Station Norfolk, which received 94 mile-per-hour winds and over three and a half inches of rain from Hurricane Donna during the September 12, 1960 onslaught.  Her crew of five escaped with the help of Sailors from the nearby Naval Supply Center (Official U.S. Navy photograph via the Virginian-Pilot). 

The legacies of historic events are always with us, in one form or another.  The same age-old dynamics that shaped history in ages past continue to shape our present.  One of these is the weather.

Sometimes the effects wrought by weather events are on a grand scale, and for the Hampton Roads Sailor, hurricanes in particular have wrought dramatic and profound changes over the years in our area.  For example, the most prominent local geographic feature to have been shaped by such events during recorded history is Willoughby Spit, said to have been formed and shaped by massive hurricanes in 1749 and 1806.     

Such events have also shaped our present in more subtle ways.  It is with this in mind I would like to bring into remembrance one of the more destructive storms to make landfall in Hampton Roads during the last century, and how a tragic yet little-noted accident that befell a local Sailor in the wake of that hurricane made an impact that still resonates in courtrooms today.

(Photographed by Keith Mosher, The Seabag)

Hurricane Donna, which swept through the area early on September 12, 1960, buffeted Naval Station Norfolk that morning with up to 94 mile-an-hour winds, smashing the Norfolk Dredging Company tug Virginian at the naval station pier, ripping the asphalt along the waterfront into massive jagged pieces, and nearly tearing the destroyer Zellars (DD-777) from her moorings.  And in the words of Virginian-Pilot reporter Richard Mansfield, “The base golf course became a huge water hazard.” 

Indirect damages inflicted by Hurricane Donna on the Navy in Hampton Roads included the loss of two fighters from Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach when they failed to reach their destination in New York, though both pilots were rescued safely. 

Around the city of Norfolk, over 1,000 trees were felled, at least 800 of which blocked streets and cut power to over half of the city’s residents.  This brings us to the tragic event that happened to two Sailors then stationed aboard the repair ship USS Amphion (AR-13) nearly half a day after the height of the storm.   

(Photographed by Keith Mosher, The Seabag)

Neither Sailor had been able to make it aboard on Sunday, September 11, when Amphion left for open water to evade Hurricane Donna, so both had reported to the receiving station, then part of the Naval Support Activity, that evening. The two had been on liberty separately since shortly after noon on Monday, but had met up in the hours since.  By around 7 pm, 23-year-old Jimmy L. Dotson, driving a friend's car, and his passenger, 19-year-old Robert A. Fenon, were traveling northwest on Jamestown Crescent towards Hampton Boulevard, back towards the naval station, when they struck a large tree that had fallen into the road earlier that day.      

(Photographed by Keith Mosher, The Seabag)

City workers had placed a yellow sawhorse just ahead of where the tree trunk jutted into the northbound lane, which Dotson did not notice in the darkened street until it was too late.  Fenon was thrown from the car when its right side was ripped away during the impact, and his unconscious body came to a rest 102 feet from where the car struck the tree, while his right arm and parts of the car’s interior remained near the point of impact.  Luckily a doctor also came upon the scene and helped save Fenon’s life. 

 

The court case that sprang from that event, Fenon v. City of Norfolk, would become a watershed moment for a tactic known as the “sovereign immunity” defense.  

(Photographed by Keith Mosher, The Seabag)

Through his attorney, Fenon filed a lawsuit on October 13, 1960 against the City of Norfolk for $185,000 in damages, alleging that the city neglected its “obligation to use reasonable care to maintain and keep its streets at all times in reasonably safe conditions for traveling,” and that it “negligently and carelessly” failed to “keep the…street in a reasonably safe condition for travel in the usual mode… by placing a barricade in the street … leaving same without lights or proper warning to approaching traffic….”

During the opening stage of the trial, which took place on February 15, 1961, a witness who lived near the accident scene, one of several who seemed to support Fenon’s allegations, testified that the stretch of Jamestown Cresent around the accident scene “was completely dark and it was just like coming upon a nightmare.”

After almost two months at Portsmouth Naval Hospital and a further stay at the naval hospital in Philadelphia, it was finally Fenon’s own turn to take the stand.  “They told me at the hospital that my Navy career is ruined,” Fenon told the court.  “I am out now and I can’t follow that trade no more."

Despite the consistent testimony of Fenon's witnesses, including one from the city highway department, that only a yellow unlighted wooden sawhorse would have alerted oncoming drivers to the fallen tree blocking the lane, deprived as it was of working streetlights in the wake of Hurricane Donna, there were a number of ways Norfolk city attorney Leonard H. Davis could have defended the city from Fenon's lawsuit.  There were inconsistencies in testimony between Dotson, Fenon and the police officer who investigated the accident.  Even Judge Clyde H. Jacob remarked after the first day's testimony that, in his words, the "broken-down car with lights that did not comply with the law," they had been riding around in was but one "proximate cause" of the accident, and that in his opinion, "if the City hadn't worked at all, hadn't gotten around to this tree, this accident would still have happened."

With such an irresolute case put forth by the plaintiff, and knowing the judges' feelings as to the merit of Fenon's case, Davis could have used reason and logic to methodically deconstruct, discredit, and ultimately demolish Fenon's case; the sort of activity lawyers are typically expected to engage in to win over a jury.  Davis, however, would pursue a very different strategy; one that would render evidence and testimony, not to mention a jury, irrelevant.  He would win this case on a technicality.

Davis did not refute Fenon's charge that city workers had been negligent in dealing with Hurricane Donna's aftermath.  Two who cleaned up the particular section of Norfolk where the accident took place on September 12  freely admitted on the stand that they only had a couple of axes and no saws with which to cut wood, and despite testimony from city officials that the hurricane had left the streets more clogged with debris than any single storm in the previous quarter-century, the workers still left work at their regular time that day because, in the words of one, "It was knocking-off time."

Rather than continuing to engage in litigious interplay with Fenon's attorney in a set-piece game to determine the relative merit of either side's cases, Davis merely declared that his client was immune to prosecution.  In Judge Clyde H. Jacob’s chambers after all witnesses had given their testimony on the afternoon of February 15, Davis moved to strike the plaintiff's evidence on the grounds that, among others, “that in this situation, in doing what it was doing at the time, the City was acting in its governmental capacity, was performing a governmental function and it is immune from liability even if it might be said that it was guilty of any negligence in the performance of that function [emphasis mine].”

The following morning, Judge Jacob granted Davis' motion, informing the jury:
 

Gentlemen of the jury, during your absence council for the defendant, City of Norfolk, moved to strike out the plaintiff’s evidence as not being sufficient in law to submit to you for a verdict against the city.  The Court has sustained that motion.  The Court is not required to tell you the reason for its ruling but you have sat here yesterday and part of today; you may be curious to know it.  The court holds and has held that the work being done on Jamestown Crescent by City employees was done in the performance of the governmental duty that the City owes the public. With the exception of repairing streets, the City is not liable for torts of its employees. The employee himself is liable but the City is not; it has that immunity; and for that reason the City cannot be held liable if the work they were doing was in the performance of a governmental function. The Court has stricken the evidence of the plaintiff.

And with that, Jacob discharged the jury from further consideration of Fenon's testimony or that of his witnesses and issued a summary judgment for the plaintiff.

  

North American FJ-3 Fury fighters of Fighter Squadron 61 (VF-61) Jolly Rogers on the flight line of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, circa 1955.  Two Oceana-based FJ-3s crashed near Hamden,  New York, after going off course and running out of fuel, although their pilots ejected safely.  A total of 39 aircraft were moved from NAS Oceana and 31 others were moved from NAS Norfolk as Hurricane Donna approached on September 11, 1960.   (National Museum of Naval Aviation via Wikimedia Commons)

On February 16, 1961, the Circuit Court of the City of Norfolk found for the city, and that “said plaintiff take nothing by his suit and said defendant go hence without day and recover against said plaintiff its costs about its defense in this behalf expended, to all of which said plaintiff, by counsel, duly excepted.” 

Fenon then appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which rendered a judgment on June 11, 1962 virtually unchanged from that rendered by Judge Jacob.  From then on, a legal precedent was set that continues to be cited in civil, maritime and even admiralty law today.  “As a general rule in most states,” a 2008 textbook on maritime and admiralty law citing the case states, “municipal governments are immune from liability for negligence in performing governmental functions, but for negligence in performing proprietary functions.” 

Writing in Virginia Lawyer magazine, Norfolk attorneys David N. Anthony and Beth V. McMahon explained, “A city or municipality engages in two types of functions: governmental functions (which are like the functions undertaken by the state) and proprietary functions (which are more akin to the functions of a private corporation).”  Fenon v. City of Norfolk helped set the definition that “A governmental function advances or protects general public health and safety,” as opposed to proprietary functions, which are characterized by the municipality performing tasks that private entities otherwise would, usually for a fee.  

Citing case law such as that established by Fenon, city attorneys across the Commonwealth of Virginia can claim sovereign immunity in order to thwart or nullify legal action stemming from "governmental functions" performed by city employees, regardless of how poorly or dangerously they are performed, and despite the fact that different courts continue to disagree just what the precise definition of “governmental functions” is. 

In stark contrast to the still-relevant court case that bears his name, Robert A. Fenon only lived another decade after losing the Virginia Supreme Court case.  He died in June of 1972, at the age of 30.