Sunday, September 02, 2012

 

VJ Day

I grow old learning new stuff every day.

Here is the wikipedia list of the the most decorated ships in the United States Navy (during WWII).

Enterprise (CV 6) is number one, of course, with 20 battle stars, the Presidential Unit Citation (PUC), and the Navy Unit Commendation (NUC). (We should be very ashamed that this ship was broken up while an undistinguished battleship, the Alabama (BB 60), became a museum). Below is a photo of a Japanese bomb hit on its deck in '42.

And there tied for 7th (along with 6 other valiant ships), with 16 battle stars and the PUC, is the destroyer on which my father served, the USS Buchanan (DD 484).

Huh. Who knew?

The slim black things in between the stacks are the torpedo tubes. That was my dad's job--he was the officer in charge of those but by the time he got in the war the Japanese surface fleet had been effectively eliminated so he never fired them. This photo was taken from the Wasp (CV 7) a little over a month before it was sunk by the Japanese submarine I-19 in September, 1942.

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