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Naval Nostalgia, Patna (2026)

09/08/2026

Nobody Knows Where the Oil Is Actually Leaking From

USS Arizona sank in nine minutes on December 7, 1941 and has not been touched since. Every day around two litres of fuel oil rise from her hull and spread across Pearl Harbor in a slow dark shimmer that visitors call the tears of the Arizona. What almost nobody realises is that the leak has never been traced. She sits in about 26 feet of water, but beneath that she is buried in roughly another 30 feet of harbour mud, and the lower part of the ship has never been examined by anyone. Scientists cannot reach it, cannot see it, and cannot say which tank is failing. The oil simply arrives at the surface, as it has for 84 years.

What can be measured is the steel above the mud. The National Park Service and the University of Nebraska have run a corrosion research programme on her since 1998, developing a technique that reads the crust of marine growth on the hull to work out how fast the metal underneath is disappearing, without ever cutting into her. The surprise was that corrosion has slowed rather than accelerated. The concretion and marine life covering the hull act as a shield, and the sheltered, low-oxygen harbour water is far gentler on steel than open ocean would be. Structural collapse and a sudden release of the estimated 500,000 gallons still aboard are, by all current indications, not imminent. But the projections only cover what they can measure, and half the ship has been sealed under mud since the morning she went down with over 900 men still inside her.

09/08/2026

The 2,000-Ton Submarine Parked in an Oklahoma Soyabean Field

It is one of the odder sights in the American heartland: a full-size World War II submarine sitting on dry land in Muskogee, Oklahoma, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, on ground that was once farm field. USS Batfish (SS-310) got there through sheer determination. When the Balao-class boat was saved from the scrappers, a group of Oklahoma submarine veterans set out to bring her home in the early 1970s, floating the roughly 300-foot submarine up the Arkansas and Verdigris river system on a high-water cycle, then easing her into a specially dug berth on the low-lying land that became the Muskogee War Memorial Park. There she was settled for good, a genuine Pacific war submarine marooned on purpose in the middle of Oklahoma, a memorial to the state's submariners far from any sea.

She earned that place of honor. Commissioned in 1943, Batfish made seven war patrols and is best remembered for one astonishing stretch in February 1945, when she hunted down and sank three Japanese submarines in just 76 hours, a feat no other American submarine has ever matched, which brought her the Presidential Unit Citation. But the same low ground that made her berth possible has become her greatest threat. In 2019 historic Arkansas River flooding lifted her off her foundation and left her damaged and closed to visitors, and she has stayed shut since. Because the site could flood again, the plan now is to move her about two miles to higher ground at Three Forks Harbor, where a new museum is being built around her. Oklahoma lawmakers approved $4 million toward the move in 2025, and the "submarine killer" now waits for the funding and the engineering to carry her the last stretch to safety.

09/08/2026

The German U-Boat Prototype That Became Finland's Only Surviving Submarine

Vesikko has one of the strangest origin stories of any museum submarine: she was secretly a German warship before she ever belonged to Finland. Built at the Crichton-Vulcan shipyard in Turku between 1931 and 1933 under the codename CV-707, she was ordered through a Dutch front company that was really a cover for German engineers. The Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from building submarines, so they sidestepped the ban by developing the boat in Finland, quietly gathering the knowledge that would shape their U-boat fleet. Vesikko was in effect the prototype of the German Type II U-boat. Finland bought the trials boat in 1936, named her after the European mink, and turned a foreign experiment into the pride of her own small navy.

She earned that pride in combat. One of only five submarines Finland ever operated, Vesikko patrolled the Gulf of Finland through the Winter War and the Continuation War against the Soviet Union, her single confirmed victory the sinking of the Soviet merchant ship Vyborg. Then peace nearly finished her off. Under the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was banned from operating submarines, and in the 1950s her four sisters were sold to Belgium for scrap. Vesikko alone was spared, and after her own veterans fought off a sale in 1959 and industry-funded volunteers spent over a decade restoring her, she opened as a museum at the Suomenlinna sea fortress near Helsinki in 1973. Today she is the last surviving Type II submarine anywhere in the world.

07/08/2026

Somebody Took a Motorcycle From a War Grave and the Loading Pattern Proved It

SS Thistlegorm was an armed British freighter carrying everything the Eighth Army needed in North Africa: Bedford, Morris and Ford trucks, BSA and Norton motorcycles, Universal Carriers, rifles, aircraft parts, Wellington boots, ammunition, and two Stanier steam locomotives lashed to her deck. She was anchored near Sha'ab Ali in the Red Sea waiting for passage through the Suez Canal when two German Heinkel He 111s spotted her at 1:30 in the morning on October 6, 1941. Two bombs went into Hold 4, the ammunition ignited, and the explosion tore her in half. Nine men died. Eyewitnesses aboard HMS Carlisle watched a locomotive fly off her deck red hot with sparks trailing from it. She sank in under a minute and has been a war grave ever since.

Her cargo stayed loaded exactly as it was packed in Glasgow, which is what makes her one of the most visited wrecks on earth, and also what makes theft detectable. A joint Alexandria University and University of Edinburgh project surveyed her with high-resolution photogrammetry in 2017 and 2022, then compared the model against Jacques Cousteau's 1955 footage. The comparison showed a BSA M20 motorcycle was gone. Researchers could even pinpoint where it had sat, on the starboard side of Hold 2 upper deck, because the loading followed a strict pattern: every Morris CS11/30 truck in the hold was packed with five BSA M20s, with exactly one exception. Cousteau himself took her bell in 1955. Since then mooring lines, looting and careless divers have been pulling her apart piece by piece, and the study exists precisely to record what is still there before more of it disappears.

07/08/2026

They Found Seven of an Aircraft That Does Not Exist Anywhere Else

USS Lexington went down on May 8, 1942 at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and she took 35 aircraft with her. When Paul Allen's research vessel Petrel found her on March 4, 2018, nearly two miles down and 500 miles off the Australian coast, the ROV confirmed her by reading the nameplate on her stern. But the discovery that mattered most to historians was lying scattered on the seabed nearby: eleven of her aircraft, preserved by cold, dark, oxygen-poor water in a condition nobody expected after 76 years. Seven of them were Douglas TBD-1 Devastator torpedo bombers. Not a single Devastator survives anywhere on earth. Every one of them was destroyed in the war or scrapped after it. These were the first anyone had laid eyes on in three quarters of a century.

The preservation is what makes the footage so striking. Blue-grey paintwork still intact, red and white striped rudder panels, and the pre-May 1942 national insignia with the red dot at the centre, markings that were changed only weeks after she sank. Fuselage numbers are still legible on the Devastators, clear enough that researchers cross-referenced them against Torpedo Squadron 2's flight roster for May 7, 1942 and confirmed that every one of these aircraft flew combat missions in the battle. Among them is one flown by Lieutenant R.F. Farrington with Ted Wiebe and Walter Nelson as crew. Nearby lies an F4F-3 Wildcat still wearing the Felix the Cat insignia of Fighting Squadron 3 and four Japanese kill flags, the former aircraft of Noel Gayler, who survived the war and retired an admiral. His fighter did not come home. It sits upright in the dark with its score still showing.

07/08/2026

One of Her Aircraft Is Still Armed With a 500-Pound Bomb

USS Yorktown was struck by three bombs and two aerial torpedoes at Midway on June 4, 1942, then finished by two more torpedoes from the submarine I-168 two days later. She rolled over and sank on the morning of June 7 with 141 of her men. Robert Ballard found her in May 1998 at 16,650 feet, a full mile deeper than Titanic, sitting upright on the seafloor with her anti-aircraft guns still aimed at the sky. In April 2025, NOAA's ROV Deep Discoverer entered her hangar deck for the first time in 83 years, going in through the number 3 elevator shaft and picking its way past entanglement hazards in the dark.

What the cameras found in the aft starboard quarter stopped the room. At least three Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bombers lay jumbled in the wreckage, and one of them was lying inverted with a 500-pound bomb still secured in its release cradle, fully armed after 83 years on the bottom. It was likely part of Yorktown's reserve force on the first morning of the battle, damaged during the Japanese air attacks and never launched. Another aircraft carries the marking B5, identifying it as one of two battle-damaged Dauntlesses from Enterprise's Bombing Squadron Six that landed aboard Yorktown after hitting the Japanese carrier Kaga, and simply never left. The same dive finally imaged the crew's hand-painted mural inside the number 2 elevator shaft, a 13-metre world map titled A Chart of the Cruises of the USS Yorktown, glimpsed by Ballard in 1998 but never seen in full until now.

07/08/2026

A Shell as Heavy as a Car, Thrown 20 Miles

The nine 16-inch guns that still point out over Mobile Bay from USS Alabama (BB-60) were among the most destructive weapons ever mounted on an American warship, and here is the strange part: she never once fired them at another ship. Each barrel could throw a 2,700-pound armor-piercing shell, roughly the weight of a small car, more than 20 miles and land it close to the target. Fire all nine at once, in a full broadside, and the ship flung more than 24,000 pounds of steel into the air in a single thunderous instant, the muzzle blast alone powerful enough to dish in the water alongside her. For a battleship, this was the whole point of her existence, the reason for her armor, her size, and her 2,500-man crew.

Yet across her entire World War II career, the "Mighty A" never traded main-gun salvos with an enemy battleship, because there were none left in front of her by the time she reached the Pacific in force. Instead she turned that firepower on the land, using her 16-inch guns to bombard Japanese island defenses ahead of the Marines at places like Tarawa, Saipan, and Okinawa, and later to shell the Japanese home islands, while her main job was screening the fast carriers and fighting off aircraft with her smaller guns. She steamed some 218,000 miles and came home with nine battle stars, one of the most traveled battleships of the war, proof that the deadliest guns afloat could help decide battles they never fought ship to ship. Today those same barrels sit silent over the bay, a reminder of a kind of power aimed, in her case, almost entirely at the shore.

07/08/2026

HMS Terror sailed from England in 1845 alongside HMS Erebus under Sir John Franklin, searching for the Northwest Passage. Both ships were beset by ice off King William Island in 1846 and abandoned two years later. Franklin and all 128 of his men died, and what actually happened to them has been one of history's great mysteries ever since, pieced together from Inuit oral testimony and a single note left in a stone cairn. Erebus was found in 2014. Terror stayed missing. Then in 2016 the crew of the research vessel Martin Bergmann stopped at Gjoa Haven and got talking to Sammy Kogvik, a Canadian Ranger and Inuk, who mentioned that years earlier he had seen a wooden mast sticking out of the ice in Terror Bay while out fishing. They diverted from their planned search area on the strength of that story and found her on September 3, exactly 170 years after the ice first trapped her.

She was sitting in 24 metres of water, upright, essentially intact, with almost all her hatches closed. As the man who found her put it, she looked buttoned down tight for winter, as though she simply sank. In August 2019 Parks Canada divers spent seven days running remotely operated vehicles through her interior, exploring 20 cabins and imaging over 90 percent of the lower deck. The cold Arctic water had preserved almost everything. Plates still sat on shelves beside the mess table, two rifles hung on a wall, sealed bottles stood upright in racks, drawers remained closed, and in the great cabin a writing desk and an armchair sat undisturbed. A sailor's initials were still carved into a wall. Archaeologists now believe written documents may survive in those closed drawers, possibly the logs that could finally explain what happened to Franklin's men.

07/08/2026

Divers Are Destroying Her Faster Than the Sea Is

SS Thistlegorm was an armed British freighter loaded with everything the Eighth Army needed in North Africa: Bedford, Morris and Ford trucks, BSA and Norton motorcycles, Universal Carriers, rifles, aircraft parts, Wellington boots, ammunition, and two Stanier steam locomotives lashed to her deck. She had sailed 12,000 miles around Africa to avoid U-boats and was anchored near Sha'ab Ali waiting for passage through the Suez Canal. At 1:30 in the morning on October 6, 1941, two Heinkel He 111s hunting for a different ship spotted her instead. Two bombs went into Hold 4, the ammunition ignited, and the explosion tore her in half. Nine men died. Eyewitnesses aboard HMS Carlisle watched a locomotive fly off the deck red hot with sparks trailing from it. She was gone in under a minute.

Jacques Cousteau found her in 1955 using directions from local fishermen who had been navigating by her protruding mast for years. He filmed her, took her bell, and left. Then she was forgotten again until the early 1990s, when Sharm el-Sheikh turned into a diving hub and she became one of the most visited wrecks on earth. That fame is now eating her. A joint Alexandria University and University of Edinburgh project surveyed her with high-resolution photogrammetry in 2017 and again in 2022, building a precise model to track what changes. Comparing it against Cousteau's original footage, researchers could identify exactly what has gone missing, including a BSA M20 motorcycle pinpointed to the starboard side of Hold 2, its absence provable because every Morris truck in the load was packed with five of them. Mooring lines, looting and careless divers are pulling her apart, and the locomotive wheel blown 180 metres clear in 1941 is still lying out there on the sand.

06/08/2026

The last conventional supercarrier is in her final year of scrapping

The former USS John F. Kennedy has been under dismantling at Brownsville, Texas since arriving on 2 February 2025, after a 2,021 mile tow from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard that began on 16 January. International Shipbreaking, which also handled her half-sister Kitty Hawk, put the job at roughly two years, meaning the last conventionally powered supercarrier in American service should be gone by early 2027. The Navy sold her for a single penny, a nominal price reflecting that the contractor profits from recovered steel and metals rather than a fee, and security around her has been unusually tight throughout.

She was never supposed to end this way. Commissioned on 7 September 1968 as the first ship named for the assassinated president, sponsored by his daughter Caroline, she served 18 deployments across four decades, from the Yom Kippur War to Lebanon in 1983 and the Gulf War, before decommissioning in 2007. Two museum efforts advanced through the Navy's donation program, in Portland, Maine and in Rhode Island, but neither could secure funding, a berth, and a maintenance plan, and in late 2017 the Navy revoked her donation hold status. Her name is already back at sea on the new carrier CVN-79, while the original Big John is cut apart on the Texas coast.

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