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Post by admiralhood on Mar 12, 2019 9:55:44 GMT -6
As we all know, Japanese battleship Nagato survived the Pacific War and became spoil of the United States. Would it be a better idea to dock it at Pearl Harbor as a Museum Ship instead of simply sinking it in Operation Crossroads? I believe that it would be a monument of the greatest victory of the US Navy.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Mar 12, 2019 10:07:47 GMT -6
As we all know, Japanese battleship Nagato survived the Pacific War and became spoil of the United States. Would it be a better idea to dock it at Pearl Harbor as a Museum Ship instead of simply sinking it in Operation Crossroads? I believe that it would be a monument of the greatest victory of the greatest victory of the US Navy. We have a lot of monuments to our victory in the Pacific War. It was a good use of the ship to test the effects of nuclear weapons on a fleet. There were only two other battleships: Nevada and Arkansas in the two tests. Nagato provided a third of possibly later construction than the first two. Nagato survived the first air burst, but the underwater burst sank her. My father was one of the men who took the scientists and officers into the bay after the two explosions. He said it was real carnage and they could not get close to some of the ships due to radiation.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Mar 12, 2019 11:25:21 GMT -6
I want to add one more comment. In 1946, one year after a costly war, no one wanted to remember the Pacific or the Japanese. We wanted that memory erased. It's only in last, maybe 20-30 years with the passing of many of the vets, that we wish to relive those terrible years. I had to watch my dad suffer for over 50 years from injuries in that war. He would not even watch Victory At Sea Series. He always felt bad that when his memory was fresh, he did not explain what had happened to me. That's why the Nagato and the Sakawa along with the Prinz Eugen were sacrificed in those test beside the fact that we had to know the effects of nuclear attack on a fleet. There were even goats on some of those ships to view the results of the blast and radiation on animals.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 13, 2019 18:22:07 GMT -6
I guess my answer is how do most Americans (the ones aware of the fact which is probably not many) feel about USS Pueblo (seized in 1968) being displayed in North Korea as a prize.
The immediate period after the war was a somewhat strange juxtaposition between eliminating as many traces of Japanese militarist culture and symbolism as possible and the need to rebuild Japan so it could serve as a stable buffer against the spread of communism. A battleship is a tremendous example of that militarist culture and if it was preserved would have been an inevitable rallying point for nationalist and populist agitation (to see it returned) that could have soured relations between the two countries.
Battleships are expensive to preserve and maintain. Heck, after the war we couldn't find the money to preserve USS Enterprise CV-6, our most decorated warship.
While a small part of me regrets that we don't have foreign examples of battleships preserved as museums to explore and contrast with our own the rational side of me understands why the defeated powers were demilitarized after WW2 and that the surviving enemy combatants (equipment, not people) were best eliminated in one fashion or another.
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Post by cv10 on Mar 13, 2019 18:42:13 GMT -6
Battleships are expensive to preserve and maintain. Heck, after the war we couldn't find the money to preserve USS Enterprise CV-6, our most decorated warship. +1
The main reason that the USS Texas was spared being scrapped/otherwise disposed of was that the Texas Legislature was fairly quick in telling the Navy that Texas would pay for the ship to be preserved and turned into a museum. New York and Pennsylvania also expressed interest in preserving their namesake battleships. In the case of New York, the state made a similar offer to the Navy, but the Navy had already slated the USS New York for nuclear testing, and told the state that the ship couldn't be spared. What makes me mad in hindsight is that we had preserved the USS Oregon after the Spanish American War, but scrapped it during World War II (part of it got turned into an ammunition barge). I know we had to win the war, but I wish we could have found a way not to scrap the USN's only pre-dreadnought battleship left.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Mar 13, 2019 19:26:45 GMT -6
Battleships are expensive to preserve and maintain. Heck, after the war we couldn't find the money to preserve USS Enterprise CV-6, our most decorated warship. +1
The main reason that the USS Texas was spared being scrapped/otherwise disposed of was that the Texas Legislature was fairly quick in telling the Navy that Texas would pay for the ship to be preserved and turned into a museum. New York and Pennsylvania also expressed interest in preserving their namesake battleships. In the case of New York, the state made a similar offer to the Navy, but the Navy had already slated the USS New York for nuclear testing, and told the state that the ship couldn't be spared. What makes me mad in hindsight is that we had preserved the USS Oregon after the Spanish American War, but scrapped it during World War II (part of it got turned into an ammunition barge). I know we had to win the war, but I wish we could have found a way not to scrap the USN's only pre-dreadnought battleship left.
Well, it is a tragedy about the USS Enterprise, Oregon and New York but as we have all said, it was right after the war and the nation was tired and did not or could not afford to maintain these ships. Hindsight is very clear but we were not there.
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