Lexington has been found

[Witt]

Thank you for finding that for us, Barney

[CWO Marc]

Thanks Barney – great story.  Paul Allen is developing an impressive track record in relation to the underwater archaeology of WWII: he found the wreck of the Musashi a couple of years ago.

[Witt]

Was that him too? I had not remembered who financed that.

[CWO Marc]

@wittmann:

Was that him too? I had not remembered who financed that.

Yes, that was him:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=35448.0

He found the USS Indianapolis too:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=40363.0

Paul Allen can afford to have some very expensive hobbies.  Goodness knows what kind of an A&A war room he’d have in his basement if he was an A&A hobbyist.

[taamvan]

We can assume that it would have actual tanks and actors as troops, right?

My grandfather says that his footlocker is somewhere on board the Lexington, fortunately he wasn’t.

[Witt]

That is good to know. Can I ask what he did on the Lexington?
Both my grandparents served in WW2, but on opposite sides! One was an RAF desk Sergeant, the other An Italian Army soldier.

[barney]

@CWO:

Thanks Barney – great story.  Paul Allen is developing an impressive track record in relation to the underwater archaeology of WWII: he found the wreck of the Musashi a couple of years ago.

Right on. Was The “Musahi” was one of their Monster Battleships ?

[CWO Marc]

@barney:

Right on. Was The “Musahi” was one of their Monster Battleships ?

Yes, Yamato and Musashi the two Yamato-class superbattleships which Japan completed.  Musashi was sunk during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, and Yamato was sunk during the Okinawa campaign in 1945.  Japan laid down two other units of the class: Shinano, which was completed as an aircraft carrier (it was promptly sunk by a US submarine) and a fourth unnamed unit which was never completed (its hull sections were used, as I recall, to build four submarines).  PBS will be showing a documentary on Yamato on March 28, 2018:

http://www.pbs.org/nazi-mega-weapons/home/

http://www.pbs.org/video/nazi-mega-weapons-battleship-yamato-official-trailer/

[taamvan]

Wittman;

I’m not sure what association he had with the Lexington, he has a sprawling collection of unverifiable and subtly changing stories that make it difficult to determine what is memory and what is…who knows.  He’s 94 now and still lives in Manhattan Kansas.

Here are the rough facts

Played baseball as a pitcher on pacific islands, good players were highly in demand
Some kind of military postman, going everywhere delivering correspondence
Stationed with AROU 1 (Aviation Repair and Overhaul Unit), which was an amazing group of mechanics that  moved from island to island, collecting whatever disabled and damaged aircraft of every type that had been left behind as frontline forces moved forwards, then cobbling together operational aircraft from those parts and spares.
Flew off Okinawa in a fully loaded heavy bomber, flying off a cliff and dropping, dropping
Made a P-38 lightning model by welding and fitting .50 and .30 casings and bullets together…its seriously the sweetest artifact ever and we still have it
Says he saw the signing of the instrument of surrender but we are still working on verifying this
Accepted surrender of two Japanese soldiers riding in a Jeep, and without a rifle close at hand which made him very nervous as this was assumed to be a secure-ish area

I wore his peacoat for a while, he was 6 2’ or so and I’m shorter so was comically short and thin…he said that the reason it was so ill fitting was that his actual issued coat is somewhere on that ship, at the bottom of the Pacific, in a footlocker, along with everything else he didn’t carry with him at the time

[Witt]

Thank you for sharing that. My grandparents have both died now.

[Gargantua]

@taamvan:

We can assume that it would have actual tanks and actors as troops, right?

My grandfather says that his footlocker is somewhere on board the Lexington, fortunately he wasn’t.

Clearly, this Footlocker needs to be recovered! and it’s belongings repatriated to your grandfather!  We need to stake a claim and get on this whilst he is still alive and before some UN/World Heritage red tape BS gets in the way!

[seancb]

My grandfather wasn’t on the Lexington but he was a Sea Bee. Helped rebuild Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. My favorite story of his is when he would retell the end of the war.
“They said they dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. We didn’t know what the hell atomic meant.”
Exact words.

[CWO Marc]

@seancb:

My grandfather wasn’t on the Lexington but he was a Sea Bee.

In case you’ve never seen it, you might enjoy watching the 1944 John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees”.  It’s a highly romanticized version of the origin of the US Navy’s Construction Battalions; not accurate historically, but fun nonetheless. One of my favourite parts is the one in which the staff captain played by Addison Richards (who often portrays businesslike, non-nonsense military officers, and thus can serve as his own straight man when the occasion demands it) is on the phone with his superior, who asks him what the new construction battalions will be called.  Richards, puzzled by the question, answers a bit blankly, “What’s wrong with ‘construction battalions’?  What?  No ‘oompf’?”  As he says this, he’s doodling on a notepad and he happens to write “C.B.” – at which point he brightens up and tells his superior that he’s just thought of a good name.

There are modern-day echoes, by the way, of the SeaBee name in the fictional Star Trek universe.  Various designs have been used for the emblem of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, and many of them feature a stylized bee (sometimes carrying six tools, one per arm), and some of the small spaceships that serve as work pods in orbital shipyards have been referred to as Work Bees.