“washe[d] his hands of the mutineers. He [did] not want to admit mutiny, so he cannot charge the blacks with that. Yet he want[ed] them off his ship.” The captain, in consultation with others all the way up to the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, decided to cut sea operations short and set the dissidents ashore. Once docked, 144 crew members left the ship, including 8 whites. The Constellation returned to sea but returned a few days later to pick up the mutinous sailors. Most of the men, however, refused to board the ship and on November 9 “staged a defiant dockside strike - perhaps the largest act of mass defiance in naval history.” Despite these unprecedented actions, none of the sailors were arrested, most were simply reassigned to other duty stations, while a few received what were described as “trifling punishments”. Sabotage as resistance As early as 1970 ships had been forced out of action by sabotage by crew members. For example, in June 1970 the destroyer Richard B. Anderson “was kept from sailing to Vietnam for eight weeks when crew members deliberately wrecked an engine.” But, in tandem with the SOS Movement, naval sabotage became an even more serious issue in 1972 as the air war dramatically expanded. “In July fires were started on the Forrestal and Ranger, the eighteenth instance of sabotage aboard the latter vessel, a prime target back home for peace activists’ ‘Stop Our Ships’ agitation.” The fire on the Forrestal resulted in over $7 million in damage and was the largest single act of sabotage in naval history. In March 1972 when the aircraft carrier USS Midway received orders for Vietnam, “dissident crewmen deliberately spilled three thousand gallons of oil into the bay. The captain of the Constellation “told a press conference in November of 1972 that ‘saboteurs were at work’ during the period of unrest aboard his ship.” The Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet stated in October 1972 that the increase in sabotage was a “grave liability” to the ability of the Navy to operate. “All told, by the close of that year the United States Navy would log seventy-four instances of sabotage, more than half on aircraft carriers, none of them attributable to ‘enemy’ action.” An investigation by the House Armed Services Committee revealed how much the sabotage had undermined naval combat operations and contributed to other forms of