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:
“Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“I have, as when the sun doth light a storm,
Buried this sigh in wrinkle of a smile;
But sorrow that is couched in seeming gladness
Is like that mirth fate turns to sudden sadness.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)