The USS New Jersey (SSN-796) was christened a few months ago. It is the 3rd USS New Jersey, this time it is an attack nuclear sub.SIAP
Navy destroyer ‘USS John Basilone” christened at Bath Iron Works
The USS John Basilone (DDG 122) is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, and is the 39th guided-missile destroyer to be completed at Bath Iron Works.www.wabi.tv
Great post! Thanks for sharing. It is nice to have a real hero get recognized like this!SIAP
Navy destroyer ‘USS John Basilone” christened at Bath Iron Works
The USS John Basilone (DDG 122) is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, and is the 39th guided-missile destroyer to be completed at Bath Iron Works.
My dad's flag sits in the middle of the hutch in the dining room. It fits because he loved nothing more than a big meal lol
Mine is on a built in bookcase next to our TV with a really nice picture of him and my wife taken at one of the NYC St Patrick’s Day Parades I was marching in.
The only thing I remember is he would list 5 island invasions.. as I get older I forget the sequence he used but it was something like , Bougainville, Tarawa, Guam, Tinian (he held the Green Acres actor Eddie Albert in very high regard because of Tarawa.. piloted his ship so close to shore and took a lot of fire that would have killed many more marines). I forge the 5th.. might have been Saipan but I remember some story like Saipan was a "break" for his unit.. mop-up duty rather than another beach landing. In any case, he almost died on Saipan and would have died had he been well enough to make the transport all his stuff was put on (it got sunk). He carried around metal plates in his leg and head courtesy of a leftover combatant (he would have said "Jap") who threw a grenade at his truck (while transporting a load of airplane tires from beach to airfield) sending him and truck down a cliff. 5 beach landings and he almost gets it during mop-up duty. War really is hell.
A bridge on the turnpike connecting Edison and New Brunswick is named after him as is the overpass on the Somerville circle.
Fortunately they didn't name a Littoral Combat Ship after him.SIAP
Navy destroyer ‘USS John Basilone” christened at Bath Iron Works
The USS John Basilone (DDG 122) is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, and is the 39th guided-missile destroyer to be completed at Bath Iron Works.
The center structure looks similar to the Littoral destroyer...
The comment was a bit tongue in cheek. The littoral ships are already being phased out after only a few years of service & are basically a costly failure. Would be sad to sell off a ship named for a NJ MOH recipient sold off to a Latin American navy.The center structure looks similar to the Littoral destroyer...
Basilone guided-missile destroyer
A Littoral Combat Ship
My grandfather wouldn't talk much about the war. But he always had a strong distain for anyone or anything Japanese. Except for Godzilla movies that he watched with me, he used to say, "the only good thing those people ever made." As I learned latter on what he went through and the friends he lost, I began to understand that disdain he held for so long.
Well, as far as I could tell, my Dad did not hold anything against them... "Jap" was just the word they were called then. I recall seeing some war movie on TV when Dad was pretty old.. forget which.. but there was a scene where the Marines had killed a bunch of them.. but one was alive and sneakily shot someone in the back after playing dead. So I casually asked him, not seriously, if that ever happened to him. He surprised me with his response.. "Well, sometimes you had to play dead. They'd walk right over you." Of course, I had never heard any actual war story from him.. but that was pretty close.
Correct! The navy are retiring these essentially new ships. They were a complete and utter boondoggle. The story is typical of many large scale military procurement activities where hardware manufacturers oversell capability and gullible, naive, or corrupt military personnel fork out billions without proper competent oversight.
Well deserved.
I make sure I look at this at least once a week to honor my dad and America.
