The Ship That Wouldn't Die - The Saga of the Uss Neosho a World War II Story of Courage and

Zusatztext “Most accounts of the Battle of the Coral Sea treat the attack on Neosho as a footnote… Author Don Keith takes a different angle! sticking with Neosho ! Sims ! and their crews as they battle the Japanese and then the cruel sea and blistering sun. The story is replete with heroic endurance and selflessness—but also human failings and miscues. Keith doesn’t airbrush the inglorious. Instead! he balances all elements to construct a satisfying narrative with deep human interest and cliffhanger appeal.” — World War II magazine   “Keith made me feel as though I was watching [the battle] in real time…  worth the price of admission for the serious historian as well as those who just like a good yarn.” —Naval Historical Foundation Informationen zum Autor Don Keith is the award-winning author of Undersea Warrior ! War Beneath the Waves ! In the Course of Duty ! The Ice Diaries ! and other nonfiction works on American naval heroism. He is also the coauthor! with George Wallace! of the submarine thrillers Final Bearing and Firing Point . BOOKS BY DON KEITH PROLOGUE May 6, 1942, in the Coral Sea, between the Solomon Islands and Australia “Abandon ship! Everybody, get off the ship!” the wild-eyed, red-faced sailor yelled as he ran through the vessel’s forward compartments. “She’s goin’ down, boys, if she don’t blow up first!” Another sailor, busy passing up ammunition to the gun crew above, had no reason to doubt the truth in what his shipmate was screaming. From his station in the number one magazine—where shells were stored to feed the forward-deck gun—the barely twenty-year-old sailor could see nothing that was going on outside the hull, but could certainly feel the thuds and tremors, and heard the thunder as his big ship took vicious hits at the bow and amidships. After a morning of cruel teasing, the vessel was now catching full-bore hell from a sizable and determined swarm of Japanese dive-bombers. Though the guns on his ship were firing back, it was clear—even down here in the dark, smoke-filled magazine—that the enemy planes were homing in, inflicting what could be mortal damage. One near hit exploded in the water just on the other side of the ship’s starboard hull from where the sailor worked. The resulting shock wave almost knocked him and his buddies to the deck. The men regained their balance, and eventually their hearing, as they kept hoisting shells up to those who were manning the bow gun, doing their best to fend off their attackers. Each man working in the magazine fully expected a bomb to crash through the deck above him at any second and light off the explosive ordnance stacked all around. They also knew the likelihood of some stray spark touching off the fumes from the cargo of fuel oil they carried in the big tanks directly below their feet. The high-pitched chatter on the ship’s communications system confirmed that their vessel was taking one hell of a drubbing. Shipmates were dying. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” the man next to the sailor yelled. “If all that fuel below . . .” But the man turned and disappeared before he finished stating the obvious, his words overcome by the roar of explosions and the rattle of the ship’s antiaircraft guns. The young sailor paused, looked around, and ran after his buddy. He took a detour to grab his life vest, which he kept stowed beneath his bunk. It was not there. Some son of a bitch had apparently decided he needed it worse than his shipmate did. The sailor knew he would have to go into the sea without it. Once topside, what he saw almost stopped his bounding heart. An enemy plane, its flaming wreckage still discernible as an Imperial Japanese Navy dive-bomber, had crashed into the stack deck, aft of the bridge. Bombs had found the fire room and engine room, l...

Product details

• Authors: Don Keith
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 18
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 07.04.2015, delayed
• EAN: 9780451470003
• ISBN: 978-0-451-47000-3
• No. of pages: 400
• Subject: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous