With powerful engines, extensive firepower and heavy armor, the newly christened battleship USS South Dakota steamed out of Philadelphia in August of 1942 spoiling for a fight.The crew was made up of “green boys”—new recruits who enlisted after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—who had no qualms about either their destination or the action they were likely to see.Brash and confident, the crew couldn’t get through the Panama Canal fast enough, and their captain, Thomas Gatch, made no secret of the grudge he bore against the Japanese.“No ship more eager to fight ever entered the Pacific,” one naval historian wrote.
In less than four months, the South Dakota would limp back to port in New York for repairs to extensive damage suffered in some of World War II’s most ferocious battles at sea.The ship would become one of the most decorated warships in U.S. Navy history and acquire a new moniker to reflect the secrets it carried. The Japanese, it turned out, were convinced the vessel had been destroyed at sea, and the Navy was only too happy to keep the mystery alive—stripping the South Dakota of identifying markings and avoiding any mention of it in communications and even sailors’ diaries.
When newspapers later reported on the ship’s remarkable accomplishments in the Pacific Theater, they referred to it simply as “Battleship X.”Aboard was a gunner from Texas who would soon become the nation’s youngest decorated war hero. Calvin Graham, the fresh-faced seaman who had set off for battle from the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the summer of 1942, was only 12 years old…
General Motors Trucks advert for the Egyptian market, by B Rice, 1929
What a cracking poster - bold, simple and striking - very of its period. This was part of a wider publicity campaign apparently run in Egypt by General Motors in 1929.
(Source: unnaturalist, via tentaclegarden)
HMS Collingwood (1882) was an ironclad battleship of the Royal Navy. She was the first example of the Admiral-class and was named after Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, Horatio Nelson’s second-in-command in the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Collingwood was commissioned at Portsmouth on 1 July 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Military Review, and was paid off into Reserve in August. She was posted to the Mediterranean, where she served from November 1889–March 1897.
She was coastguard ship at Bantry from March 1897–June 1903, when she paid off into the reserve, where she remained until sold. Broken up, 11 May 1909.
James W. Buel, Sea and land: an illustrated history of the wonderful and curious things of nature existing before and since the deluge (1887). ‘The Phantom Ship’
(via generallynautical)
Archive
Mobile
RSS
Revista Theme
Tumblr