Boatswain’s mate Angelo Marinelli knew something big was up when a bathtub was brought aboard his ship, the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, in December 1944 while it was moored at the Boston Navy Yard. Read the rest of this entry »
Jean Cole was 11 when Luftwaffe bombers leveled parts of Glasgow in the spring of 1941 where she grew up. Sun photo by Don Moore
Jean Cole was an 11-year-old Scottish school girl when the Germans marched into Poland in September 1939 starting World War II. She lived in a Glasgow tenement with her parents, twin sister and little brother.
Dave Schmidt of Port Charlotte, Fla. is shown in front of a map covered with pins and colored strings noting the voyages he made aboard the USS Memphis and the USS Quincy in the Atlantic and Pacific during World War II. Sun photo by Don Moore
Dave Schmidt joined the Navy at 15, before World War II. He was a big boy for his age – 5-ft., 6-inches tall and 215-pounds.
“I was an out of control kid. My parents both worked and they decided the Navy was the best thing to straighten me out. They told the Navy recruiter my birth certificate was lost in a fire and I was 17-years-old,” the 86-year-old Port Charlotte man recalled almost seven decades later.
Ken Burns, left, and Stan Goode were the radar operators aboard the battleship King. Photo provided
The crippled German battleship Bismarck was just over the horizon, steaming erratically with two jammed rudders, the result of an earlier attack by ancient fabric-covered British torpedo bombers flying from the deck of the carrier HMS Ark Royal. The date was May 26, 1941.
