In keeping with our Memorial Day tributes, let’s pay homage to the brave men of the USS Franklin (CV-13). An Essex-class aircraft carrier, on March 19, 1945, the Franklin was launching an air strike just 50 miles off the Japanese coast when a single enemy plane managed to evade radar and drop a bomb that devastated the ship and killed a third of the crew. But they fought back, saving their ship and becoming the most decorated crew in US Navy history. And the Franklin itself became a legend to the generation that fought the war.
Times change, however, and people forget. And I suspect that few today remember either the ship or the terrible sacrifices of its crew. But in the late 1960s, the World War II generation was still in the relative prime of life. When the Franklin was slated for scrapping, the same NBC that now provides a platform for the likes of Keith Olbermann produced a documentary narrated by the great Gene Kelly entitled, ‘The Ship That Wouldn’t Die’. In the film, members of the crew return to their ship at a Virginia scrap yard and remember that awful day when they were lifted beyond themselves into immortality.
Here is part one, the other five parts here, here, here, here, and here.
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