good stuff... thx
Posted on 08/19/2017 1:08:09 PM PDT by Riley
If you retract your “This would be unknown” qualifier, we could be in agreement.
I had the opportunity and privilege to speak for several hours with the ship’s doctor many years ago. He was very open, and I can tell you, I was quite moved.
The thing that got me was how he said he could not even hear the Lord’s Prayer without choking up. And he choked up even telling me that.
50 years later. It still has that effect on him.
I see your point but it was/is a not forgotten story.
It was, he made you feel the sharks breathe on your butt...
:)
My grandfather was born in England and was a Canadian soldier in WW1. He only opened up to me in private, when I asked him to. I was very young then.
He never volunteered such talk and often resisted it. He told me much, and although he passed in 1978, he is much missed. Perhaps his greatest gift to me was sharing with young me things that woke him up in the night, on my insistence. I saw that war through his brave eyes.
Kind of me back in the day. Managed to avoid brig time (Marines). LOL
I was sitting with my cardboard box of popcorn in my hands...when the shark comes up out of the water at Richard ??? who was throwing out the meat ...I smacked my hands together ...popcorn shot up out of the box and fell on other people rows away...you can imagine the startled screams...
my husbands whispered to me “I’m never getting you popcorn anymore”
LOL
Amen
$75. worth of popcorn down the drain.
What? Are you a 1%er and can afford a movie AND popcorn? You must have won the lottery. :)
We were both in the military and overseas and watched the movie at the theater on base...
everything was a bit cheaper
:)
The Bridge on the River Kai
I decided to send the story to friends and neighbors, but there was only one person among them who would have known of this tragedy.
The two of us are about the same age, served the same years in the US Navy, and are WWII history buffs: others, if they hadn't seen the movie, wouldn't have recalled the USS Indianapolis story.
Chode; part of the answer to why they dropped the dazzle camoflage is revealed by a closer look at the two photos you posted. You can tell that the ship went through an extensive overhaul which included a reconstruction of much of the superstructure. Most of the major surface units of the USN did during the war. In fact, the Indianapolis had just completed her overhaul when she left for Tinian. Looks like they just didn’t repaint her with dazzle.
Very good pictorial history of the Indianapolis can be found here:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/04/035/04035.htm
A resource worth bookmarking.
By the way, the overhaul process was one of the many advantages we held over the IJN. Our shipyard capacity was so great, we decided to use the east coast yards for new construction and the west coast yards for repair, overhaul and reconstruction. At the navsource website, look at the reconstructed West Virginia and Tennessee for example. They went from looking like WW1 dreadnoughts on Dec. 7 1941 to looking like modern battleships in 1945. The Japanese couldn’t begin to match that.
I’m also a WW II history buff. US Army RVN.
good stuff... thx
Yep one of the great ones. Bridges of Toko Ri was another of William Holden’s good ones. Today a single smart bomb or cruise missile would take those bridges out.
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