Fate
On 9 July 1945, Callaghan took station on the embattled radar picket line, where on 28 July she drove off a wooden-and-fabric biplane intent on suicide with well-directed fire, but the plane, skimming low and undetected, returned to strike Callaghan on the starboard side. It exploded and one of the plane's bombs penetrated the after engine room. The aircraft survived the first approach because the proximity fuses were ineffective against its wooden fuselage. The destroyer flooded, and the fires which ignited antiaircraft ammunition prevented nearby ships from rendering aid. Callaghan sank at 02:35, 28 July 1945, with the loss of 47 members of her crew. She was the last Allied ship sunk by a kamikaze during the war.
Read more about this topic: USS Callaghan (DD-792)
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“It has come to this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are hedged about, we think, by accident and circumstance; now we creep as in a dream, and now again we run, as if there were a fate in it, and all things thwarted or assisted.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We must all die. There’s nothing terrible about death. But to live on after death, a soul, earthbound, a vampire—you don’t wish any such fate for your beloved.”
—Guy Endore, and Tod Browning. Prof. Zelenn (Lionel Barrymore)