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World Warships, New York, NY (2026)

06/02/2026

When 85 Japanese Bombers Found HMS Hermes.

06/02/2026

The carrier is being towed to her grave. Slowly. Deliberately. No enemy did this. No torpedo, no storm, no battle. The U.S. Navy itself made the call — and on May 15, 2006, tugboats began dragging the 32,000-ton USS Oriskany out into the Gulf of Mexico at two knots. Destination: the bottom.

Two days later, the charges detonated. Engineers had estimated five to eight hours.
It took 37 minutes.

The 888-foot hull slipped beneath the surface 24 miles off the coast of Pensacola, Florida — and when divers went down to confirm, they found her sitting perfectly upright on the seafloor at 215 feet. The Navy had a new name for her now: the Great Carrier Reef. Today her hull is frequented by whale sharks, tiger sharks, and hammerheads, while manta rays, octopuses, and an occasional Warsaw grouper drift through the vast sunken shell.

Not a bad second act.
The Mighty O earned two battle stars in Korea and five more in Vietnam over 25 years of service. But the moment that defined her wasn't combat — it was a fire.

On October 26, 1966, off the coast of Vietnam, a sailor panicked after accidentally igniting a magnesium flare — and instead of throwing it overboard, threw it back into the locker where hundreds of others were stored. 44 men died. 156 were injured. She survived it.

Decommissioned in 1976, struck from the Navy list in 1989, sold for scrap in 1995 — then repossessed in 1997 because nothing was being done with her. The old carrier just refused to disappear quietly.

It took the Navy three years and $20 million to prepare her for the seafloor. Then on a Tuesday morning in May 2006, they sent her down — deliberately, carefully, respectfully.

Thirty-seven minutes.
A ship that survived Korea, Vietnam, and a catastrophic fire 50 miles off an enemy coast. Gone in thirty-seven minutes. On purpose.

There's something almost poetic about that.

06/01/2026

An aerial perspective over Pearl Harbor captures a powerful contrast between history and remembrance. The battleship USS Missouri (BB-63), one of the last Iowa-class battleships, rests as a symbol of the final chapter of World War II, where the Japanese surrender was officially signed aboard her deck in 1945.

Nearby lies the USS Arizona Memorial, built directly above the sunken remains of the battleship lost during the 7 December 1941 attack, where over a thousand sailors remain entombed. Together, they form the core of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Hawaii, representing both the beginning and the end of U.S. involvement in the Pacific War.

The scene is often used in historical photography because it visually connects two defining moments of naval warfare: the destruction that drew the United States into the war and the vessel that marked its conclusion.

06/01/2026

She Was Born a Queen. She Died a Legend.
In 1937, USS Yorktown (CV-5) slid into commission as one of the most powerful warships on the planet. A 25,000-ton fleet carrier, 824 feet of American steel and ambition, built at Newport News and ready to own the seas.

She got to work fast.
When Japan dragged the United States into war in December 1941, Yorktown was already in the Atlantic. The Navy yanked her to the Pacific almost immediately. She raided the Marshall Islands. She hit Marcus Island. She was everywhere at once — the kind of ship that made admirals sleep better at night.
Then came the Coral Sea, May 1942. Yorktown took a bomb hit that would have sidelined most carriers for months. Her crew patched her in 48 hours. Forty-eight hours.

Then came Midway.
June 4, 1942 — the battle that broke the back of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Yorktown's aircraft helped send four Japanese carriers to the bottom. But the enemy hit back hard. Japanese dive bombers and torpedo planes tore into her. She listed. She burned. Her crew refused to quit.
They almost saved her.

Damage control parties got her upright, got her moving. Then a Japanese submarine — I-168 — found her on June 6th, still afloat and under tow. Two torpedoes. That was it.

USS Yorktown CV-5 slipped beneath the Pacific on June 7, 1942, taking 141 of her crew with her.
She rested undisturbed for 56 years, until Robert Ballard's expedition found her in 1998 — 16,650 feet down, sitting upright on the ocean floor, almost perfectly preserved.

From a sunlit harbor in 1937 to a coral-covered cathedral at the bottom of the sea.
Some ships just refuse to disappear quietly.

06/01/2026

April 9, 1942. The Indian Ocean, off the coast of Ceylon. HMS Hermes was in trouble before the first bomb ever dropped. The Royal Navy's most historically significant carrier, the world's first vessel designed and built from the keel up as an aircraft carrier was sailing with an empty flight deck. Her aircraft had been offloaded at Trincomalee days earlier. She had no air cover, no strike capability, and no realistic way to defend herself against what was coming.

What was coming was Admiral Chuichi Nagumo's Kido Butai, the same carrier strike force that had torn apart Pearl Harbor four months prior. That morning, 85 Japanese dive bombers lifted off from their carriers and went hunting. Radar picked up the incoming raid. Warning signals went out. But by the time Hermes understood the scale of what was bearing down on her, it was already too late to matter.

The Aichi D3A dive bombers fell on her in waves. She took over 40 direct hits. Her hull buckled, her compartments flooded, and fires ripped through what was left of her. From the moment the first bomb struck to the moment she disappeared beneath the surface, roughly ten minutes passed. Ten minutes to send a historic warship and hundreds of men to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

307 men lost their lives. Among them was her commanding officer, Captain Richard Onslow, who did not leave his ship.

The carnage didn't stop with Hermes. The Australian destroyer HMAS Vampire, which had been sailing alongside her, was sunk in the same attack. So was the corvette HMS Hollyhock. It was a clean sweep.
Some survivors were pulled from the water by a hospital ship that arrived in the aftermath. But for 307 men, there was no aftermath.

The sinking of HMS Hermes stands as one of the most lopsided and painful losses in Royal Navy history — a carrier sunk without her aircraft, without a fighting chance, and without a single bomb dropped in return.

06/01/2026

Meet the T12 High Explosive bomb. Nicknamed the "Cloudmaker." At 43,600 pounds — nearly 22 tons — it holds the grim distinction of being the largest aircraft-delivered conventional bomb produced during World War II.

The concept came from the British. Barnes Wallis, the genius behind the Dambusters' bouncing bomb, had already pioneered the earthquake bomb doctrine with his Tallboy and Grand Slam designs. Don't blow up the target. Bury the bomb next to it. Let it detonate deep underground, trigger a shockwave through the earth, and let geology finish the job. The Americans took that idea and, in classic fashion, made it bigger. Much bigger.

There was just one problem. No aircraft in the American inventory could carry it. The B-29 couldn't handle it. The bomb waited on the B-36 Peacemaker — and by the time that aircraft arrived, the war was already over.

The Cloudmaker never made it to combat. Built for a war that ended before it could be used. What remains is this: 22 tons of American industrial ambition, standing at a road junction on a military base, with a one-way sign pointing somewhere it never got to go.

05/31/2026

March 17, 1986. The USS Forrestal is operating off the coast of Mayport, Florida, when a KA-6D Intruder tanker assigned to VA-176 — the "Thunderbolts" — erupts in flames on the catapult deck.

The canopy is already gone. The crew jettisoned it seconds ago. The ejection seats are about to fire.
Tail number 513 is fully engulfed. There is no saving her. The fire consumed what decades of carrier operations had not — a Grumman-built machine that had served her country faithfully and would never fly again. She was shipped back to Grumman afterward. Then scrapped.

What the camera captured in this single frame is the razor-thin margin between life and death that carrier aviation has always demanded. The catapult deck of a supercarrier is one of the most dangerous workplaces on earth, and this photograph is proof of exactly that — frozen at the precise moment when two men decided that staying in the cockpit was no longer an option.

05/31/2026

Torn in Two — And Both Men Walked Away
On the night of July 11, 1994, USS Kitty Hawk was heaving ten feet in both directions when Lieutenant "Pig" Arnold of VF-51 came in too low and hit the ramp. The F-14A Tomcat BuNo 162602 caught an arresting wire on impact, and was physically ripped in half. The rear fuselage and engines erupted into a fireball on the flight deck. The entire forward section, cockpit and all, went overboard into the sea.

In those final fractions of a second, his RIO LCDR "Animal" Jennings initiated the ejection. Both men got out. Both men survived.

No fatalities. Just a $38 million fighter jet split in two, a burning wreck on the deck, and two aviators alive to tell the story.

05/31/2026

On September 21, 1992, a UH-46D Sea Knight helicopter came down hard on the fantail of the ammunition ship USS Suribachi (AE-21) in what could have easily become a catastrophe. The aircraft had been in the middle of a routine ammunition transfer from the carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower when mechanical failure robbed the crew of any good options. It didn't glide in. It went down.

The Sea Knight ended up badly damaged, its massive airframe sitting in a precarious position on the stern of the Suribachi — a ship loaded with ammunition. The margin for disaster couldn't have been thinner. A fire, a spark, a shift in the aircraft's position — any one of those variables could have turned a survivable accident into something far worse.

It didn't.
All four crew members were pulled out alive. No fatalities, no explosion, no second tragedy layered on top of the first. Just a wrecked helicopter, a shaken crew, and the kind of outcome that makes you quietly exhale.

The UH-46D Sea Knight had long served the Navy as a workhorse of vertical replenishment operations — the unglamorous but essential business of moving supplies, ammunition, and equipment between ships at sea. Incidents like this one were a reminder that those missions, however routine they appeared on paper, were never without risk. The sea doesn't care about routine. Neither does mechanical failure.

The crew of that September afternoon got lucky. They also got rescued. Sometimes, that's the whole story.

05/31/2026

November 25, 1944 — USS Essex (CV-9), The photograph captures a moment that defines the desperate, terrifying logic of the kamikaze campaign in the Pacific. A Japanese aircraft already committed, already past the point of no return closes on USS Essex with nothing left to offer but the machine and the man inside it.

Essex was a veteran by then. She had fought her way across the Central Pacific, her air groups striking Rabaul, the Marianas, the Philippines. She was not a soft target. She was a fleet carrier surrounded by steel, gunfire, and trained men whose entire job was to prevent exactly this.

It didn't matter.
The Zero punched through the anti-aircraft curtain and hit her flight deck at 14:56. The explosion and fire killed fifteen men and wounded forty-four more. By the brutal arithmetic of that war, it was a survivable blow Essex was back in action within weeks. But the photograph doesn't tell you that. What it tells you is the violence of the instant: the smoke, the angle of impact, the indifference of physics.

The kamikazes were not a sign of Japanese strength in late 1944. They were the opposite a confession that conventional tactics had been exhausted. But a weapon born of desperation is still a weapon, and on that afternoon off the Philippines, USS Essex learned that lesson the hard way.

Fifteen men never came home from a ship that survived the war.

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