Posted on 03/06/2018 6:11:05 AM PST by George - the Other
The wreck of a US aircraft carrier that was sunk during World War Two has been found off the coast of Australia.
The USS Lexington was found 3km (2 miles) underwater in the Coral Sea, about 800km off Australia's east coast.
The ship was lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea, fought with Japan from 4-8 May 1942. More than 200 crew members died in the fighting.
The US Navy confirmed the ship had been discovered by a search team led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Went on to serve on the Bennington and the Card in WWII,
Anyway, the family couldn’t read some of his writing (as a junior high teacher, reading scribbles was easy for me) and had no idea what ‘Zekes’ and ‘Bettys’ were so I transcribed it for them and printed it out.
Some of it reads as if he was writing it as events were happening—one entry has a kamikaze diving toward Bennington and his relying the order “Hit the Deck”. His descriptions of the Battle of Okinawa (which he spells phonetically at first) are exactly like the history books portray—unusually easy getting onto the island, terribly harder the deeper our soldiers and marines got in.
The typhoon is in it as well as Bennington hitting a whale and having it stuck on its bow for a while. Fascinating reading.
“Leyte Gulf was big also.”
My father was at both battles.
She, and the Saratoga were originally designed as battlecruisers (CC). A class of six ships were laid down, and four were scrapped on the building ways. The Lexington and Saratoga were completed as aircraft carriers, under the terms of the 1922 Naval Treaty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexington-class_battlecruiser
British First Sea Lord Admiral John Fisher is given credit for developing the concept of a “faster, more lightly armored battleship.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser
Two miles down and 500 miles out from Australia........They're lucky they found it..........
Interesting too that they burned the other currency, covering the stacks with fine mesh screens to be sure all was consumed, per Wicki....
...Wiki. Whackey. Whatever....
Nimitz asked the shipfitters in Hawaii how long it would take to make the Yorktown battle worthy again. They told him at least three months. Nimitz said, you have three days, and by George, they did it. The around-the-clock operations required so much arc welding and other demand for electric power that the Navy secretly leaned on the power company and Honolulu had rolling power outages for a while.
That some very interesting news I never knew about the rolling blackouts in Honolulu that is what you learn from fellow freepers
Here’s another tidbit for you.
During the Battle of Midway,
621 bombs were dropped from altitude by the US.
Not one of them hit anything but ocean.
IIRC, The Yorktown was back to sea within a day of it’s arrival at Pearl Harbor. 1,500 welders worked on the repair.
We fixed that with skip bombing B-25s and topedo ladened Marauders.Scared hell out of the japs and the crews that flew the missions.There is a painting depicting one of the B-26 Marauders flying right down the deck of an IJN carrier.How in the hell do you top that.I bet there was more than one of the crew that relived that after the war, over and over.
That is so cool.One of the greatest generation for sure.
Battle of Midway: Repairing the Yorktown After the Battle of the Coral Sea
Yard workers and sailors worked flat out over three days to get the carrier Yorktown patched up and ready for the decisive Midway battle
When Yorktown sailed out of Pearl, bound for Midway, the last tug to cast off also took the last of the Shipyard workers off the ship.
Yup. It’s an amazing story.
The Devastator would be nice to recover, as there are none in existence today.
This Devastator would be perfect for recovery, but no progress has been made to date, that I can find.
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