Posted on 10/18/2019 11:10:41 AM PDT by DFG
Deep-sea explorers scouring the world's oceans for sunken World War II ships are investigating what they believe could be the third ship of seven lost to the Pacific during the Battle of Midway.
Hundreds of miles off Midway Atoll, nearly halfway between the United States and Japan, a research vessel is launching underwater robots miles into the abyss to look for warships from the famed Battle of Midway.
Weeks of grid searches around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have already led the crew of the Petrel to one sunken warship, the Japanese ship the Kaga.
This week, the crew is deploying equipment to investigate what could be another.
Historians consider the Battle of Midway an essential victory for the U.S. and a key turning point in WWII.
Frank Thompson, a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C., who is onboard the Petrel said: 'We read about the battles, we know what happened. But when you see these wrecks on the bottom of the ocean and everything, you kind of get a feel for what the real price is for war.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I like Mifune, he’s always robotic that’s his style.
I had more problems with Arnold - Pat Morita as a karate master in Karate Kid.
The IJN carriers at Midway were sunk by as little as a single 1,000-lb aerial bomb. It was the internal secondary explosions that did them in.
Interestingly the USN learned a major lesson from the loss of the USS Lexington at Coral Sea — once you fly off your main strike, you flood your fuel lines with inert, non-flammable gas and return any unloaded ordnance to the armored magazines. The law of averages says that you’ll sustain a hit or 2. But USN damage control and defensive preparations were key to making US carriers much more difficult to sink. (notice I didn’t say, knock out of action).
Sure hope there aren’t any Jap sailors still hiding out down there on the Kaga.
The story I had heard was that the destroyer was prosecuting a depth-charge attack against a US sub, gave-up, and was racing back to assume its place in the destroyer screen of the Japanese carrier strike force.
Coral will overgrow man-made objects and make them unrecognizable in the course of a decade or so.
If there are they might still think the war is on.
Mitsuo Fuchida was a technical advisor for the carrier scenes...especially the launch at sunrise. Which, ironically, was filmed on the Essex-class carrier USS Lexington.
The idea of his Son being in love with a Japanese girl does not sound like a bad idea for a sub plot. It was just totally screwed up in the movie.
In Tora, Tora, Tora, instead of a sub plot they would just shift from American story, to Japanese.
I think the USS Yorktown is so deep there has been very little growth on her. She was found in 1998.
*ping*
It’s not?
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Adding, maybe pinging too.
Their defeat at Midway was so bad that the Japanese gov't didn't tell the full story to the Japanese people until 1955, nearly ten years after the end of the war. For us, it was a near-run thing, and brilliantly defended, but at great cost. Had the Japanese been able to attack with two more carriers (that was the original plan), probably would have gone the other way, and delayed victory in the Pacific.
If memory serves a single US flyer at another battle the previous month, through his sacrifice, actually helped win both battles by descending into AAA fire and dropping his load right down the elevator shaft, blowing all the planes stored below -- one less carrier for the Midway operation.
I can't turn up info on it, can't structure the search right, hope someone knows. Good reason to ping the list, eh? Ah, here it is -- loads slow, it's a FReeper Foxhole from 2003.
The battle of the Coral Sea?
In Harm’s Way with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas was also good.
I can only vaguely remember watching that one as a kid. Can’t miss with Kirk Douglas and The Duke.
Well its a bit slow moving these days. After the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor there hasnt been much follow up by them. :)
The flight and hangar decks on Kaga became infernos of avgas fires and exploding bombs. The Japanese pulled survivors off of Kaga and then scuttled it with torpedoes.
The flight deck was apparently destroyed by fire and explosion so what we are seeing in the pics is a mostly intact hanger deck and hull.
Short range side scanning... super duper...Hi-Freq sonar.
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