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The USS North Carolina battleship, now decommissioned and resting across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, participated in every major naval offensive in the Pacific during World War II. It carried out nine shore bombardments, sank an enemy troopship, destroyed at least 24 enemy aircraft and assisted in shooting down many more. It then survived the scrap yard to become North Carolina’s official World War II memorial.

But when the Battleship Commission announced in 2001 that much-needed refurbishment to the 73-year-old vessel would require a trip up the East Coast to Norfolk, Va., or down to Charleston, S.C., many prepared to cross their fingers. No one knew if the old war horse could survive one more trip.

Now, it doesn’t have to.

During a press conference on the ship’s fantail Thursday, Capt. Terry Bragg, executive director of the North Carolina Battleship Memorial, announced that he and the Battleship Commission voted May 31 to have the refurbishment done where it sits by using a cofferdam.

A cofferdam is a series of walls made of sheet piling, like that along the Riverwalk in downtown Wilmington. The wall is driven into the riverbed surrounding the ship, enabling water inside this watertight “room” to be pumped out, exposing the ship’s hull.

“Our world is changing here on the battleship,” said Bragg…

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Two motor boats which helped save countless lives during World War II have gone on public display in Portsmouth, alongside more famous ships such as HMS Victory.

The boats, which were involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk and the D-Day landings, among other missions, have been painstakingly restored with a grant from the National Heritage fund.

Alison Harper reports.

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The Navy said today that a sunken vessel found in the Philippines’ Balabac Strait has been identified as the World War II submarine USS Flier.

The Flier, which departed Pearl Harbor in January 1944 for its first war patrol, had seen extensive action by the time it struck a mine and sank on Aug. 13, 1944.

Seventy-eight crewmen were lost when the submarine went down.

Fourteen crewmen escaped, but only eight survived the long swim to reach shore. After making their way by raft to Palawan and being protected for several weeks by local people and a guerrilla unit, the sailors were evacuated by the submarine USS Redfin…

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The recovery of the sunken German World War II submarine the U-864, which holds a potentially dangerous cargo of some 65 tonnes of mercury, has been placed on hold after the group charged with its salvage seems likely to be prevented from doing so under its present contract.

The wreckage, which lies near Fedge on the western Norwegian coastline near Bergen, has seen the estimated cost of recovery balloon to somewhere between NOK 1.2 billion and 2.2 billion – double the cost of original forecasts. The submarine has been the subject of ongoing debate amongst salvagers, politicians, local inhabitants and environmental welfare groups who have labelled the wreck as hazardous.

The issue as to whether to bring the wreck to the surface or instead cocoon the vessel in a virtual sarcophagus in order to eliminate the risk of pollution has long been debated by experts involved in the drama, says Norway Post.

The issue appeared settled earlier this year, when the Norwegian government decided in January on raising the wreckage. The initial NOK 800 million contract was awarded to a Dutch salvage company.

However, a new report by the Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics and the Norwegian project management organisation the Dovre Group criticises the Dutch salvage group Mammoet and claims a lack of clarity in several areas. The new report further states that going ahead with the operation under the current contract is not advisable, recommending instead that new tenders for the submarine salvage should be called for…

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SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian hospital ship torpedoed by the Japanese during World War Two with the loss of 268 lives has been located in waters off the coast of the northern state of Queensland, the government said on Sunday.

The loss of the Centaur in 1943 while sailing to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea was one of Australia’s great wartime disasters. Survivors and their relatives have long pressed for the wreck to be found, fearing salvagers would reach it first.

The government eventually supported a search for the vessel.

On Sunday, it said the wreck’s location had been confirmed by a team led by U.S. marine search expert David Mearns, whose other finds include HMAS Sydney, another Australian wartime wreck.

The sinking of the Centaur was considered a war crime, though no one was ever tried for it. The converted merchant vessel was clearly marked as a hospital ship and had no naval escort, as required by international conventions.

Many of the dead were medical staff.

“The discovery of AHS Centaur will ensure all Australians know of and commemorate the 268 brave nurses and crew who died in the service of their nation,” Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said in a statement.

Jan Thomas, whose father Bernard Hindmarsh was a doctor who died aboard the ship, said finding the wreck would bring some relief. Now 73, she was six when the ship was sunk on May 14, 1943.

“It is always helpful to know where your loved ones lie,” she told Reuters…

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FUJAIRAH : The Gulf of Oman’s pithy-black deeps have finally surrendered secrets of the mystery sinking of Nazi submarine U-533 during the Second World War, XPRESS has learnt.

Several years after the discovery of the U-boat on the seabed 108 metres below by Dubai shipwreck hunter and diver William Leeman, a new deep-sea mission in October to the U-boat’s final resting place has confirmed a fatal blast hole was ripped into her rear port side, dooming the twin-screwed 76.8-metre-long vessel and 52 crew members to a watery grave.

Clear waters

Capitalising on clear waters and armed with electric underwater scooters and high-powered spotlights, Leeman and his team of recreational divers discovered the two-metre gash near her propellers, confirming reports by RAF (Royal Air Force) Squadron 244 that a British light bomber aircraft had scored a direct strike on the submarine on October 16, 1943.

“This is where she was hit by a depth charge by a British Blenheim that struck from the air,” said Leeman, 52, an electrical engineer. “During our last dive, we could see the jagged edges of the hole where she was blown up. That was the moment of truth – the ship then sank to the bottom in a forward motion marking the epic death of 52 German mariners.”…

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The two submarines were among the most advanced of their time, but neither saw action in WWII. The U.S. captured the subs at war’s end and sank them off Oahu after gleaning their scientific secrets.

U.S. researchers said Thursday that they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the craft was the largest non-nuclear sub ever built and had the ability to circle the globe 1 1/2 times without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long and 40 feet high and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U.S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., although changes in tactics, and the end of the war, prevented such attacks.

The second, which also never entered the war, was an attack submarine called the I-201 whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today. It was thought to be more than twice as fast as any U.S. subs used in the war.

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The “Mighty Mo,” the World War II battleship best known for hosting the formal surrender of Japan in 1945, is heading to the shipyard for repairs.

The USS Missouri, now a decommissioned vessel called the Battleship Missouri Memorial, will leave its historic spot at Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor in October. The move will come shortly after the vessel on Wednesday hosts a ceremony marking the 64th anniversary of Japan’s surrender. U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, and Ret. Lt. Gen. Wallace “Chip” Gregson, newly sworn in as Assistant Secretary of Defense, are scheduled to speak at the event.

At least 20 World War II veterans are expected to attend, including 89-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor Edward F. Borucki of Southampton, Mass. “It’s a sentimental journey,” Borucki said, who lost 33 shipmates when a Japanese torpedo and bombs hit the USS Helena.

The 65-year-old ship is in good shape, but it still needs to go to Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard for repairs because rust is protruding from peeling paint in areas and the teak wood deck is warped and bent in others. The warship’s exterior is due to be sanded down and repainted in a $15 million overhaul paid for by memorial reserve funds and a Department of Defense grant.

“Rust never sleeps as they say,” said Michael Carr, the memorial’s president. “It’s a big job. It has to be done.”

Most of the work will be done after the 887-foot ship is put into a closed dock and the water around it is drained. This will allow workers to paint the entire hull, even parts that are normally submerged. Some of the repairs have already begun pierside, however. Tourists visiting the ship now can see scaffolding encircling the ship’s mast.

Memorial officials have started warning Hawaii tour operators they’ll be shut down for three months starting mid-October. The historic ship is due to return to Pier Foxtrot 5 in early January and resume welcoming visitors shortly after. More than 400,000 visitors tour the vessel each year…

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Time is the enemy now.

It’s taking them, one by one, the wizened sailors who patrolled the South Pacific during World War II, as the Allied fleet hop-scotched from one Japanese-controlled island to the next. Three from their ranks fell this week alone. Only six brittle-boned sailors made it to Harrisburg for this weekend’s reunion of the USS Wasatch, the flagship of the Pacific fleet.

In all, maybe 50 are left from a crew of 800. Most of the rest are too frail to travel, said Margaret Shuey of Pittsburgh, a sailor’s wife who serves as an unofficial secretary and bearer of bad news.

“We’re losing them,” she said in hushed tones as the surviving sailors sat around another hotel table laughing and reminiscing.

Yet, when these octogenarian sailors gathered to swap stories more than 60 years old, then just as spiritedly debate the details, the mood was anything but somber. Most of the survivors were 17 when the Wasatch set sail in 1944, so the war years doubled as their rites of passage.

It was the first time many of them sipped beer, got drunk and perhaps met a woman or two during leave on exotic Pacific islands.

It helped that their ship was among the most protected in the Navy. A floating command center, the Wasatch was where the admirals with the scrambled eggs on their hats called the plays for the Allied amphibious assaults on islands from Leyte Gulf to North Borneo.

“I’ll tell you what, we had it made,” said Henri Buzy, 83, of New Jersey, who spent his own rocky time aboard a destroyer, a class of ship affectionately called “tin cans” by sailors…

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Robert Stanley White hasn’t erased the horrific memories of April Fools Day 1945. The 84-year-old Navy picket veteran calls it the First Day of the Kamikazes.

That day, the U.S. began fighting for pivotal Okinawa, near the Japanese mainland. That day, the first of 5,000 suicide pilots reserved to fend off the mainland invasion began their strikes. Historically, the last day of the kamikazes should be 19 weeks later on Victory in Japan Day, or VJ Day. Depending on which side of the International Date Line you stood, VJ Day was 64 years ago on Aug. 14 or Aug. 15.

But for the U.S. radar picket destroyers, the suicide planes didn’t necessarily end with Emperor Hirohito’s famous radio surrender. Bob White knows that firsthand because his picket shot down two kamikazes on Aug. 14, an hour after the Japanese peace plane flew over on its way to the Philippines to sign a cease fire with U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

White has an overload of World War II anecdotes of suicide misses and “kamikaze kills” by his beloved pickets. All those who were aboard these Navy destroyers have fascinating stories, and that’s what White wants Americans to remember on this VJ Day anniversary.

“This is not my story but a story about thousands on the pickets who have received little credit for their role in ending the war,” said White, who married Biloxian Irma Lund and is now retired on the Coast.

“In Okinawa, 80 percent of the pickets were damaged or sunk, and 5,000 sailors dead and another 4,000 injured.

“There were 4 1/2 months of solid terror every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter if we were at sea or in harbor. We were in constant attack mode. We never slept. We were afraid suiciders would get us.” He also recalls the wartime camaraderie and wants to swap stories. But White has found no local veterans of Okinawa pickets, the “3/8-inch steel tin cans” vital to the last pitched battle of the war.

White is a plank owner of one of those pickets, the USS Brown DD-546. That title means he served on the Brown from its commissioning in July 1943 to war’s end, by which time the Brown had received 13 battle stars. The small destroyer claimed 27 kamikaze kills, a Japanese cruiser and two destroyers and her crew received Navy and presidential unit citations…

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Valentine McFadden remembers what it was like 64 years ago when President Harry S. Truman announced on Aug. 15 the Japanese had surrendered and the war in the Pacific was at an end.

“They were working us real hard,” the 87-year-old Port St. Lucie resident said. “The boatswain’s whistle was sounding off all morning, telling us things to do. Then they announced the war was over.” McFadden, then a hospital corpsman on board the attack transport USS Garrard, and his fellow corpsmen broke out a bottle of Schenleys bourbon they had hidden in the medical storage bins. But there wasn’t time to enjoy it.

A seaman on one of the other nearby U.S. ships suffered an appendicitis attack as the end of the war was being announced, and he was transferred to the Garrard for surgery. That ended celebrations for the medical crew. The Garrard was operating in support of Navy and Marine units. It had space for more than 700 ground troops and a complement of about 400 men. McFadden was an original crew member – the Navy calls them “plank owners” – for the Garrard since it was commissioned March 3, 1945.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., McFadden joined the Navy in 1942, did his boot camp at Jamestown, N.Y., and was sent to school to become a hospital corpsman. Upon graduation, he was assigned to provide medical service to a Navy SeaBee construction battalion at Camp Perry, Va., then sent to the Garrard, which was fitting out for sea in California…

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NOAA will lead a three-week research expedition in August to study World War II shipwrecks sunk in 1942 off the coast of North Carolina during the Battle of the Atlantic. The shipwrecks are located in an area known as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” which includes sunken vessels from U.S. and British naval fleets, merchant ships, and German U-boats.

“The information collected during this expedition will help us better understand and document this often lost chapter of America’s maritime history and its significance to the nation,” said David W. Alberg, expedition leader and superintendent of the USS Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. “It continues the work conducted by NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries last summer to research and document historically significant shipwrecks tragically lost during World War II.”

Alberg said the expedition, which happens August 4-24, will also help document the condition of these vessels some 67 years after they were lost. Understanding the wrecks’ current condition is a crucial first step in establishing efforts to preserve these historic sites, which serve as “time capsules from one of the darkest times in the nation’s history,” he said.

This year’s project will be divided into two phases. Phase one of the expedition will be conducted aboard the NOAA Ship Nancy Foster. Using advanced remote sensing technologies, including sidescan and multibeam sonar systems, researchers will attempt to locate several previously undiscovered WWII shipwrecks. NOAA and its expedition partners from the University of North Carolina will also deploy an advanced remotely operated vehicle to take high-definition imagery of these shipwrecks…

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A team of 12 divers will today (Thursday, August 6) begin a five-day project to try to find a Landing Craft Tank (LCT) which sank in 1944. The team hopes the project in Bracklesham will solve the sea mystery and save the LCT before it is lost to the sea forever. The LCT was used in the D-Day landings, carrying tanks and armoured bulldozers. It was part of J Force and was due to landforces before it was sunk by gunfire.

“There are many second world war wrecks along the south coast and many remain unidentified,” said Alison Mayor, who will be leading the diving project.

“Their story could soon be lost forever to the sea. Some of these wrecks have been dived for many years, but it is only when you start looking at the story behind their sinking do you begin to appreciate their true historical significance.”

Last year the divers, from Southsea Sub-Aqua Club, finally solved the mystery of how two tanks, two bulldozers and a gun came to rest on the seabed eight miles offshore in Bracklesham.

The exact location of the LCT has yet to be confirmed. Earlier in the year a relative of one of the crew who had survived the sinking contacted the Southsea Sub-Aqua Club after hearing about the work it had been doing in connection with the incident.

The historic world war two armoured vehicles and gun lie jumbled up on the seabed at a depth of 20m, but there is no known associated shipwreck nearby.

As a result of their work the divers believe they now have the evidence to prove they were lost from a LCT and not from a section of Mulberry Harbour bridge section as previously believed…

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EVANSVILLE, Ind. – A World War II troop landing ship that is now a floating military museum on the Ohio River has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The National Park Service granted the designation to the LST-325, which it says is one of the few surviving American vessels to go ashore on D-Day in 1944. The ship has been permanently moored at Evansville since 2005.

Ship commander Robert Jornlin tells the Evansville Courier & Press that while several American battleships are on the National Register, the LST-325 is unique because it is still a working ship.

The LST-325 will be included in the Military Vehicle Preservation Association’s convention in Evansville next month, after which it will travel to Jeffersonville for an American Legion convention.

USS LST Memorial

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*The Rohna Survivors Memorial Association

John Lynwood Smith, a survivor of the World War II German air attack that sank the HMT Rohna, resulting in the largest loss ever of U.S. troops at sea, was laid to rest Sunday in Amelia Presbyterian Church cemetery in Amelia Courthouse.

The Winston-Salem, N.C., resident, who retired in 1983 as senior vice president and manager of the Amelia office of Central Fidelity Bank, died Thursday at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem of complications after surgery for a broken hip. He was 89. The Halifax County native was among 2,000 American troops bivouacked aboard the Rohna, an aging British freighter-turned-transport-ship, as it steamed east through “Suicide Alley” in the Mediterranean on Oct. 26, 1943, en route to the Far East via the Suez Canal.

German bombers located the convoy about 4:20 p.m. About an hour later, after a fierce encounter, a Luftwaffe bomber unleashed a Henschel Hs293 radio-controlled glide bomb that smashed a 60-foot hole in the Rohna.

Troops, who had been ordered below deck for their safety, struggled to escape the inferno after the missile exploded. When lifeboats were found rusted or painted securely to their moorings, soldiers clambered down ropes pitched over the sides of the ship and fell into a sea awash with bodies.

During a desperate night, some were killed as the stern of a rescue ship accidentally pounded them in rough seas, and others died as they clung to flotsam and one another in frigid waters…

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