Seeadler Harbor - History

History

Further information: Admiralty Islands campaign#Securing Seeadler Harbour

On February 29, 1944, General Douglas MacArthur led Operation Brewer to take the islands from the Japanese who had occupied them beginning in 1942. The islands were secured by the Americans on March 19, 1944, who then built a large base at Seeadler Harbor including wharves and an airbase. This base served as a staging area for further World War II operations in New Guinea and the Philippines.

USS Mount Hood exploded accidentally while moored in Seeadler Harbor on 10 November 1944. The ship was carrying ammunition and the tremendous explosion caused 432 fatalities, 371 wounded, damage to surrounding ships and base from debris and sinking or severely damaging 22 smaller craft.

The wrecks of the U.S. Navy's Large Auxiliary Floating Dry Docks, AFDB-2 and AFDB-4, and an Imperial Japanese ship amongst others are located within the harbor.

Read more about this topic:  Seeadler Harbor

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

    History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)