Yahoo News On This Day: Stricken Torrey Canyon oil tanker is bombed by Navy and RAF in bid to sink it off Cornish coast
MARCH 29, 1967: The Royal Air Force and Royal Navy unleashed a two-day bombing campaign on the stricken Torrey Canyon oil tanker in a bid to sink it on this day in 1967.
Bomber crews dropped 19 tons of ordnance on the Liberian ship after 32million gallons of crude oil gushed into the sea off the Cornish coast in Britain’s worst spill.
The RAF also dropped petrol on the remaining oil - which had affected hundreds of miles of coastline in Britain, France, Guernsey and Spain – and burned it off.
A British Pathé newsreel shows the Cornwall as a 'battle area' as 2,000 soldiers and marines were filmed rolling in vast amounts of detergent and manning the pumps.
And they were seen cleaning the previously pristine beaches near Porthleven and other famous holiday spots deluged in what was then the world’s worst oil spill.
Volunteers were also shown rescuing blackened seabirds after the disaster had already caused the deaths of 20,000 others.
Bombing began 11 days after the 120,000-ton Torrey Canyon ran on to rocks in between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and became Britain’s biggest shipwreck.
British Pathé also filmed the unique peacetime operation as planes from both the Fleet Air Arm and RAF dropped 42 bombs weighing a massive 1,000lb each.
It triggered a giant smoke cloud that reached 1,000ft in the air, could be seen on shore 16 miles away and, said the narrator, 'almost resembled an atomic mushroom'.
Although the operation was a success, the MoD was criticised as a quarter of their bombs spectacularly missed the stationary target.
The ship, which was sailing from Kuwait to the Milford Haven refinery in Wales, struck Pollards Rock at the Seven Stones reef on March 18.
The mostly Italian crew boarded lifeboats and made their way to safety in Penzance as crowds watched from the shore.
To help disperse the oil, a flotilla of boats were sent out to spray detergent on it and to try to float the ship off the reef.
But, before they could dislodge the Torrey Canyon, the disaster took a fatal turn and an engine room explosion blew a hole through the deck.
The blast killed the captain of the Dutch salvage mission.
Nineteen days after the disaster, oil drifted onto the coast of western Guernsey. The oil was removed and dumped into a quarry - and remains there to this day.
[On This Day: Britain’s first North Sea oil rig collapses]
The disaster is widely regarded as the world's first major marine oil spill and ecological disaster.
It remains Britain's worst oil spill, and prompted changes to international maritime laws – with ship owners bearing sole responsibility for spills – and helped develop new clean-up methods.
The UK and French governments eventually received one of the largest settlements in history.
But they were only able to serve writs after British lawyer Anthony O’Connor arrested the captain of the Torrey Canyon’s sister ship in Singapore.
The tanker now lies at a depth of 100ft.
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An inquest in Liberia blamed Italian captain Pastrengo Rugiati after discovering that he had taken a shortcut to save time in getting to Milford Haven.
Among the disaster’s cultural impacts, the then little known botanist David Bellamy came to public prominence after making a series of prominent TV appearances.
