15 thoughts on “Forty-Seven Years Ago”

  1. I was 10 years old back then, and really into space stuff. I remember watching Neil and Buzz walking (bouncing really) on the Moon the night of the 20th. It was past my bedtime, but my parents woke me up so I wouldn’t miss it. Being alive to witness such history is a special gift.

  2. Also the 71st anniversary of USS Indianapolis departing San Francisco with the uranium core for “Little Boy”aboard, marking the last time three quarters of her crew, including my father’s first cousin, would see the US.

    1. Thank you for commemorating him. So many actual human beings perished in that horrible war. Those on our side died in the defense of freedom, and deserve our respect. It’s so sad that the crew of the Indianapolis suffered such losses after completing their mission. But it was a vital mission, and was crucial in ending the war. Not just ending it. Winning it.

        1. I always knew that I was named for my father’s cousin who was killed when his ship was sunk in WWII, but I didn’t know what ship he was on until Jaws came out in 1975, when I was 13. For whatever reason I had never before asked about any details, as best as I can remember now. But when Jaws came out and Quint’s speech started to raise awareness of what happened to Indianapolis I can recall my father reading a newspaper article about it and him saying “That was Cecil’s ship”. And I’ve been following and researching her history, loss and the aftermath ever since.

          1. Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis?
            Brody: What happened?
            Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin’ back, from the island of Tinian to Laytee, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you’re in the water, chief? You tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know… was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin’. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it’s… kinda like ol’ squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he’d start poundin’ and hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got…lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin’ and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin’ and the hollerin’ they all come in and rip you to pieces.
            Y’know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don’t know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don’t know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin’ chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well… he’d been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He’s a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

        2. Quints dialog is in error as well, Indianapolis was struck by torpedoes in the first minutes of July 30, 1945 not June 29.

          1. Additional info from Wikipedia:

            Arguably the most well known fictional reference to the events occurs in the 1975 thriller film Jaws in a monologue by actor Robert Shaw, whose character Quint is depicted as a survivor of the Indianapolis sinking. The monologue emphasizes the numerous deaths caused by shark attacks after the sinking. John Milius was specifically brought into the production to write lines for this scene and he based them on survivor stories. However, there are several historical inaccuracies in the monologue: the speech states the date of the sinking as 29 June 1945, when the ship was actually sunk on 30 July, that they were spotted at noon of the fifth day rather than the third day, that 1,100 men went into the water and 316 came out (nearer 900 went in and 321 came out, of whom 317 survived) and that because of the secrecy of the atom bomb mission no distress call was broadcast, while declassified Navy documents prove the contrary.[37]

  3. Trinity Site is open to the public twice a year, the first Saturdays in April & October.

  4. SpaceX just launched CRS-9 to the International Space Station and successfully landed their first stage at LZ-1. And it won’t even make the news, no more than a 747 successfully flying from New York to LA would make the news. Good.

    2. SpaceX’s seventh flight of the year, new record for them. And they have five months left.

  5. So one of my sins is my fascination with the development of atomic weapons. We all have our dark sides. Here is a series of three carefully synchronized photographs you might find interesting.

    http://www.americancrisis.us/images/2013_08_30_013709_1_teller_light_2.jpg

    I haven’t been able to independently verify the veracity of the above, however there is this blog entry about it:

    http://whkrog.blogspot.com/2011/05/great-technical-photograph.html

    Also this photograph which reveals what’s inside the box being carried out of the MacDonald ranch house in a photograph you can see in Richard Rhodes’ book: The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Louis_Slotin_and_the_Gadget_Bomb.jpg

    In the photo taken at the Trinity test site you can see the bomb casing yet to be “armed”, Dr. Louis Slotin (in sunglasses, self-described bomb putterer-togetherer and later victim of same), Sgt. Herbert Lehr assistant to Dr. Slotin, the assembled bomb core sitting in its wooden “carrying box” with lid off (in the Rhodes’ book you can only see this box with the lid on) and off to the side in profile, looking on I believe is USN Capt. William S. “Deak” Parsons. Unknown to all yet, due to thermal expansion from its own radioactivity the core “slug” would not fit into the hole made for it within the bomb! But a problem solved via thermal conduction…

  6. Rand,

    Not to nit-pick, or anything, but…I noticed on the very last page of the Evoloterra PDF that Neil Armstrong’s dates are still shown as “1930 – .”

    Seriously—Bravo Zulu, old friends! 😉

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