Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "USS Silversides - Conducting more than one kind of operation!" video.

Thanks. When My Dad was stationed in New Hampshire, I went on one of these when I was about 8 years old. It looked pretty much like this. It was some kind of a Navy Day or something where they were letting civilians tour the ships. My Mom was not happy about having to climb down the ladder to get in the sub - in a dress. The crew was right there. They were friendly and somewhat amused by us. They had the sail of one sub as a memorial at one of the local sub bases. We saw the Thresher Launched and I knew a kid whose father was aboard as a technician when it sank. There were a lot of the people who lived in that area employed by the ship yard and the Navy. That loss hit them hard. I wasn't living there any more but one of my friends sent me a letter. One thing about that area in the 1950's was that WWII had only been over for about a dozen years and everyone there remembered it very well. When the movie Sink the Bismarck came out that was something that had been very real at the time too. It wasn't going to happen - but people who lived there were speculating on the Bismarck taking on our Coastal Artillery Batteries. People who live in areas like that - where they can look out their front door and see the Atlantic Ocean - have imaginations about what actually could happen - even if it wasn't ever going to. I mean - the US wasn't even in the War then but people will imagine all kinds of things. After all - this is something the Germans could have physically done - even if they weren't going to. There was a "disappearing" Costal Artillery Battery near our house - and this tower from the war of 1812. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Portsmouth_nh_martello.jpg That was our house in this picture. It was about 200 yards from the river on one side and another couple of hundred yards from the Atlantic on the other. You can imagine what people living there during WWII felt about German Submarines. It was really something for an 8 year old boy. Ships went up and out the Portsmouth River all the time - and we'd see WWII Attack Transports with all the little LCVP's training off the coast. Big and small Coast Guard Cutters. There was a light house off the coast that painted our house every night. Fog horns. The North East United States isn't drenched in History the way certain parts of Europe are - but - compared to most of the rest of the US - there's a lot of it. Just past our house was a Coast Guard Base that had been a British Base before the Revolutionary War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_William_and_Mary We used to go into that gun battery position and play. The guns were gone and no one was there - but my Father warned us about going into any rooms where we couldn't see - because there were Ammunition Hoists in the Fortifications from the Magazines down below. My parents were not happy about us playing around old fortifications like that but - kids do all kinds of things they aren't supposed to. I climbed the Water Tower at Camp Pendleton when I was six years old ... .
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