Posted on 12/07/2016 7:07:44 AM PST by PghBaldy
In the aftermath of the attacks on Pearl Harbour during World War Two stories emerged of sailors who were trapped in the sunken battleships, some even survived for weeks.
Those who were trapped underwater banged continuously on the side of the ship so that anyone would hear them and come to their rescue. When the noises were first heard many thought it was just loose wreckage or part of the clean-up operation for the destroyed harbour.
However the day after the attack, crewmen realised that there was an eerie banging noise coming from the foward hull of the USS West Virginia, which had sunk in the harbour.
(Excerpt) Read more at warhistoryonline.com ...
We still remember and honor them.
My uncle is a veteran and was in the battle for Okinawa. To this day he has only said two things about the war.
1. He despises the Japanese.
2. People die in war and there isn’t anything you can do about it but move on and deal with it.
I would have thought it was impossible to live 16 days without water.
May God bless each of them. They died protecting our freedoms.
They had water. When they salvaged the ship, they found someone had opened the (drinking) water container(s).
I don’t know for sure, but I would suppose they had watches that were wound to keep them running. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches has a section on wristwatches and the military, but I didn’t find anything more specific.
Wearing a watch, maybe, and remembering to wind it.
So was my dad.
I visited the Arizona memorial a few years back. There was a reverence at the site. Everyone was silent or spoke softly, contemplative, aware of what had happened where they were standing. Even the small children were quiet.
Probably a wrist watch.
I read about this years ago in some account of Pearl Harbor, and I remember reading that when the Marines drilled on the beach, they could hear the tapping in the hull. And then the taps became fewer and eventually stopped.
There was not much of a way to rescue them with what was available on Hawaii, so the decision was made not to bring in the equipment to cut into the hull, mostly because it wasn’t clear that any equipment they had available at that time would have been able to do it before the sailors died. So it would have been pointless to halt the war effort.
This was before modern wireless communications, so these men had no way of knowing what was going on outside their ship.
It still gives me nightmares and I always pray for these sailors in their horrible slow death, just as I pray for the poor people entombed under the WTC, who also took weeks to die.
God is eternal so time is nothing to Him, and he can use our prayers to alleviate sufferings at any earthly time. So I pray for them that he shorten or make more bearable their sufferings. And if we pray for them, surely they know this now.
What do you and your uncle think about the fact that we just gave back part of our base on Okinawa to Japan the other day?
The word among the West Virginia crewmen was that the compartment was haunted. Over the course of the next couple of years, crewmen would hear knocking from inside that compartment, open the WTD and find no one in the space. My dad, who served on WV during the war,knew several sailors that swore up and down the compartment was haunted.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was the WWII veteran’s COMMANDER IN
CHIEF; as such most reverenced him. Ever since, FDR’s
coat tails have worn thin. - HUSSEIN OBAMA used FDR’s
coat tails for probably the last time. OBAMA has presided
over the final Democrat Debacle, we hope. He has spit in
the ordinary “Deplorable American’s” eyes. We have made a
move recently in defiance of HUSSEIN & HIS ENTIRE COMPANY.
- FLUSH!
Ditto that.
In any extreme situation, you cannot survive for more than:
3 minutes without air - 3 hours without shelter
3 days without water - 3 weeks without food.
http://www.ruleof3survival.com
Same here. Dad was a U.S. Navy Signalman. He tried to join the Marines but the Recruiter told him he had enough Marines and told him he was joining the Navy. My Dad couldn’t swim a stroke until Boot Camp anyway. LOL
He served on multiple Ships including a Destroyer, Sub Chaser, LST and an Ocean Going Tug that was tasked with pulling disabled Landing Craft off the Beaches and Coral Reefs while under fire. He almost bought the Farm on that Ship.
He was at Iwo Jima as well and he survived the 1945 Typhoon that hit our Fleet off Okinawa. He told me even the old Sea Dogs were green and puking their guts out when that hit.
My Father’s older Brother was a Seabee. Navy all the way.
Mt Father died on October 26 at age 93. We found a few of his old Medals while going through his stuff. Never saw them before.
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