Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered"
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There have been many more pilotless private aircraft that have presented problems to civilian authorities. I was involved with chasing one Piper Cub that actually took off without a pilot, climbed to about 2500 feet, leveled off, still with no pilot, and flew west. It crossed over six counties before it became our problem. My department had a helicopter, so we were detailed to get in the air and try to find the plane and follow it.
It took a while to find it because we only had weather radar, and the FAA was only able to give us partial radar tracks since a Cub without a transponder is actually a great stealth aircraft, being mostly canvas over a collection of steel alloy tubes. There was only about an hour of daylight left when we spotted it, still flying straight and level. Our first issue was it was headed directly toward a range of mountains with 3,000 foot peaks. While we thought the Cub would not make it over the mountains, it somehow flew through one of the few passes that was less than 2,000 feet and continued on its merry way.
Now we really had problems, since the plane was headed toward an urban area of the county. Norad was still trying to find a fighter to scramble, and the FAA wanted to know if we were able to shoot the plane down. Sure. Between myself and the other observer, our armament consisted of two Glock .40 caliber pistols, and it was quickly decided that our air to air combat training wasn't adequate to attempt that stunt. As the Cub flew over various cities, we now had police cars and fire departments from I don't know how many jurisdictions that had joined in the ground chase. The pilot of the Cub, which had landed at a small private airport to answer the call of nature and had left the engine running while he did , was finally able to update the FAA with the amount of fuel he "thought" he had onboard, and they calculated that the plane should have about 25 minutes of fuel left. It was only flying at 65 mph, and our Long Ranger was able to easily fly at 120 mph, so we were able to get out ahead of the plane to alert the now considerable number of ground units where the Cub was likely to be in the next five minutes, and then zip back behind it. We had a great pilot that flew Hueys in Vietnam, and I think he was actually enjoying this.
The Cub eventually flew over 11 cities in our county before heading toward the sparsely populated coast. It was now nearing sunset as the Cub flew directly into the setting sun. The Cub had its newly installed anti-collision strobe light on, and that allowed us to follow it at that point. Now this ghost plane started to descend, and the Coast Range of mountains presented our next problem. There are 1,500 to 1,900 foot peaks there, and the Cub had reached about 1,000 feet before approaching the mountains. We put some distance between our aircraft and the Cub, and waited for the inevitable crash. To our surprise, the next thing we saw was the Cub flying through a 600 foot pass, missing those rocks in the sky again. We were able to follow the Cub with our FLIR now, and almost at the second the plane was over the coast, the prop stopped spinning, and the poor old Cub was finally out of fuel. It went into a steeper but still level decent, making contact with the water about four miles offshore. The Cub was a beautifully restored 1940 model J3 that we had seen at various airshows, and it was a sad thing to watch her sink. Still, we were glad that ordeal was over with. In my 27 years with the department, that was one of my more exciting days. :-)
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The Nevada's 14" rifles had a tested range 19.89 miles. Luckily for the troops ashore on D-Day, Nevada had been refitted at the start of 1944 with the most modern fire control radars. She was able to provide danger close gunfire support better than an any other battleship that day. As she moved closer to shore she was able to bring her ten 5" guns to bear as well. So many 5: shells were fired that some sailors from the gun crews from the 5" turrets on the non-beach side of the ship had to be used to toss enough empty brass overboard so sailors could actually walk on the decks. She then stayed offshore shelling other German positions until the end of June before proceeding to New York for a reline of her worn out gun barrels.
After her refit and adding even more modern gun direction radars she proceeded to the Pacific and continued her gunfire support role off Iwo Jima, shelling Japanese positions within 100 yards of advancing Marines. After Iwo, she then proceeded ot Okinawa and again shelled Japanese positions. She was struck by a Kamikaze on March 27, 1945 and was hit by five armor piercing shells from a Japanese shore battery on April 5. She was able shrug off the damage to continue on the gunline until April 19 before proceeding to Pearl Harbor for a quick repair and barrel relining again. She was back at Okinawa by early June and was then assigned to shell high value targets in coastal Japan. She was able to destroy everything from steel plants to shipyards in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
It's possible Nevada may have been the last battleship to fire her main battery guns in anger for WWII. She was offshore from Japan firing at a Japanese airfield. Word of the surrender came just as full broadside was on its way. As far as I can find out, no other battleship had a gunfire assignment that day. She fought from the very first to the very last day of the war. She survived sinking at Pearl Harbor, being hit by German and Japanese shore batteries, and shot down at least 17 Japanese planes before and after being hit by a Kamikaze. She fired 5,028 14" rounds, 18,297 5" rounds, 23,333 40mm rounds, 13,311 20mm rounds.over the course of the war. She was then used as the ground zero target for the air dropped during the first Bikini atomic bomb test, as second bomb that was exploded underwater about 300 yards from Nevada. Not only did Nevada survive both bombs but, if she wasn't so intensely radioactive, her boilers could have been fired up and she could have proceeded under own power. She was then towed and anchored offshore Pearl harbor until late July when she was towed about 200 miles offshore to be sunk as an ordnance target. On July 31 she was subjected to almost six hours of naval gunfire from 3" to 16" guns and being hit by at least five aerial torpedoes. Only after this battering did the old but reliable Nevada slip below the waves to her final resting place about 1900 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean.
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The Stephen Hopkins was also armed with two .50 caliber and two .30 caliber machine guns. It was these guns, plus the two 37mm guns at the bow, and the sailors who manned them that allowed the single 4" gun on the Stephen Hopkins to cause such damage to the Steir. The machine guns kept up a heavy and accurate fire on the ship, killing crew members trying to get to the 5.9" guns that were concealed on the Steir. The steel plates concealing those guns had to be dropped before the main battery could fire. Every time gunners saw a head pop up to do so, they were shot.
Eventually, one German 5.9" gun got in action, and the first round hit and destroyed the bridge of the Stephen Hopkins, the location of the all four machine guns. The machine guns were destroyed and the gunners were killed. The next round hit the 37mm gun tub at the bow, killing their gunners as well. Their combined fire stopped return fire from the Steir long enough for the 4" gun to fire off 20 rounds and fatally damage the Steir. Lt. (jg) Kenneth Willett USNR, had exercised his gun crews mercilessly, knowing the 4" gun was their only hope for a real defense. He practiced for exactly what happened when his ship met the enemy, using the 37mm guns at bow and the machine guns on the bridge to keep the enemy away from their guns while his crew could fire the 4" gun as fast as they could load the shells. With a well trained crew, the gun could fire 6-8 rounds a minute. In about a minute and a half, the gun crew fired off those first 20 rounds before the Stier could answer, a rate of fire that was probably the fastest ever attained with a 4" gun. Even though this single gun couldn't save his ship, the constant training done by Lt. Willett did assure the destruction of a German raider that had already sunk four other merchant ship and was just at the beginning of her voyage.
Not only was the SS. Stephen Hopkins the only American ship to sink a German surface ship in combat, she was the first US ship to sink a German surface ship in WWII.
[Edited to replace "Hoskins" with "Hopkins" and "Steven" with "Stephen". I was apparently having a bad day. ]
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@shaggybreeks I was living in the Bay Area then and it became the most drawn out police action in history.It started out with the Red Power movement, a mostly native American group of Berkeley students with communist leanings as a way to start seizing property that they thought they could claim belonged to them, even though there was no evidence native Americans ever occupied the island for the same reason the occupation finally wound down -there was no water on the island. As the occupation dragged out hippies, street people, and assorted criminals and drug addicts were getting ferried over every weekend by sympathetic boat owners. The numbers grew from 89 to over 400. Women were getting raped, people were being robbed, and a general sense of lawlessness prevailed. It was a good example of why anarchy won't work.
One of the leaders, Richard Oakes, had his 13 year old daughter fall to her death from a wall in early 1970. This was the beginning of many of the original occupiers. Many of the Red Power students, showed their commitment by leaving with the excuse they didn't want to flunk out of Berkeley. The vast majority of occupiers were then just street people and drug addicts. The few native Americans left got into intertribal battles that sometimes ended in bloodshed It still took another year and a half before the Feds finally decided to end it in June, 1971 after an arson fire destroyed a large number structures. By then, only 15 people remained to be removed by a force of 300 federal officers. It was sad thing and should never have been allowed to go on as long as it did, but it was a poster child of how the country was descending into anarchy at the time.
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My understanding of the history of Andaman Islands is that Arab slave traders used the islands for fresh water and wood supplies as they plied the trade routes from Somalia to India and even on to China. The trade may have been going on since the tenth century, and certainly from the twelve century. Slave traders apparently took what they could from the islands, including the native peoples for slave trade. The Arabs looked upon them as black Africans that had somehow escaped to the islands. This went on for at least five centuries before there were any shipwrecked sailors from Europe on the Islands. The treatment of the various tribes by these slave traders seems to have predisposed the Andaman peoples to judge all outsiders as dangerous and needing to be killed before they could kill them. The British added their own layer of hostility to the mix while building convict colonies in the Andamans.
One last colonial irony affected one of the VC winners from Arracan. William Griffiths was still a private in the British army in 1879, itself quite a feat for a solder 13 years after getting the VC. I haven't found much about him except for the fact he was apparently an alcoholic, and it was only the VC that stopped him from being drummed out of the Army. He was still with the 24th Regiment of Foot on January 12, 1879 at Battle of Isandlwana, the first major battle between an organized army of Africans, now know as the Zulus, and the British army. Griffiths, along with the rest of the 2nd/24th Regiment of Foot battalion, fought to the literal last bullet, and they ran out of bullets before the Zulus ran out of men. Everyone in the battalion was killed that day as their position was overrun by Zulus.
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