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Up in the Space, 86-3 Rockaway Boulevard, Ozone Park, New City, NY (2026)

08/30/2026

The Navy paid one cent to have the Top Gun carrier scrapped

The Ranger sat at Bremerton for eight years waiting for someone to save her. The USS Ranger Foundation wanted her on the Columbia River at Fairview, Oregon, a Pacific Northwest answer to New York's Intrepid, but the fundraising never reached the target and the problem of hauling a 1,070 foot supercarrier up the river was never solved. A late 2014 petition gathered over 2,500 signatures for a Long Beach berth, and NAVSEA replied that she was no longer available for donation. As a Navy spokesman put it, they would have liked her to become a museum, but it just was not in the cards.

On 22 December 2014 the Navy paid International Shipbreaking of Brownsville one cent to tow and dismantle her, the lowest price possible, since the contractor covers the tow and keeps the profit from the scrap. She left Bremerton on 5 March 2015, went 16,000 miles around the tip of South America because she was too wide for the Panama Canal, and reached Brownsville on 12 July. Scrapping finished on 1 November 2017. Commissioned in 1957 and decommissioned in 1993, she had made 22 Western Pacific deployments, earned 13 battle stars in Vietnam, launched strikes in Desert Storm, and played herself in Top Gun.

08/30/2026

Her Name Is Right Way Up on the Bow and Upside Down on the Stern

The Edmund Fitzgerald vanished from the radar of the Arthur M. Anderson on the evening of 10 November 1975 without a distress call, without a lifeboat launched, and without a single survivor from her crew of 29. A Navy aircraft found her four days later using magnetic detection gear, about 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point in roughly 530 feet of Canadian water. The following May the Navy sent down the unmanned submersible CURV-III, and the pictures it brought back explained more than any inquiry has since. She was in two pieces. The bow section, around 276 feet of her, sat upright in the mud with her name still clearly readable along the side. The stern, about 253 feet, lay capsized roughly 170 feet away with the words Edmund Fitzgerald and her home port of Milwaukee upside down on the lakebed. The 200 feet of midsection between them was gone, reduced to twisted steel and a spill of taconite pellets.

Nobody has ever established why. The Coast Guard blamed ineffective hatch closures allowing gradual flooding. Others have argued structural failure, or that she bottomed out on a shoal, or that a rogue wave simply put her under. Every theory has holes because the evidence needed to settle it is scattered across that missing midsection. Diving her is now illegal without a permit under Ontario law, which closed the last realistic chance of finding a smoking gun. In 1995 an expedition recovered her bell and put a replica in its place engraved with the names of all 29 men, and that replica is the closest thing they have to a headstone. No bodies were ever recovered from her.

08/30/2026

She Sank More Japanese Warships Than Any Other American Submarine

USS Harder earned that record in four days. On her fifth patrol in June 1944, off Tawi Tawi, Commander Sam Dealey sank three Japanese destroyers and heavily damaged or destroyed two more, using the down-the-throat attack, the most dangerous manoeuvre in submarine warfare, where you hold your position while an enemy destroyer charges directly at your periscope and fire into its bow at close range. The Japanese fleet at Tawi Tawi was alarmed enough by the losses to sortie ahead of schedule, disrupting its own preparations before the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Dealey became the most decorated submariner of the war.

She went down on 24 August 1944 off Dasol Bay near Luzon with all 79 men aboard. Nobody survived, no message got out, and for the US Navy the record simply stopped there. Everything known about her final hour comes from the other side's files. Japanese records show she fired three torpedoes at an es**rt ship, that the es**rt evaded all three, and that it then turned in and depth charged the area until the contact was destroyed. Tim Taylor's Lost 52 Project located her in 2024 at more than 3,000 feet, and the Navy's archaeologists then faced the usual problem with submarine wrecks, which is that they are all essentially the same shape with no name on the hull. What settled it was her condition. She sits upright on her keel, relatively intact apart from depth-charge damage aft of the conning tower, and the imaging was good enough for the Naval History and Heritage Command to confirm her without doubt. The Japanese account and the wound in her side now agree.

08/30/2026

Missouri's Crew Wanted Revenge. Her Captain Ordered a Funeral Instead.

On 11 April 1945, off Okinawa, a Japanese Zero came in low and slammed into the starboard side of USS Missouri, exploding in a fireball. The pilot was killed instantly, and though no one aboard the battleship was badly hurt, part of his body came to rest on her deck. What happened next is one of the strangest and most humane episodes of the Pacific war. Captain William Callaghan ordered that the enemy pilot be given a full military burial at sea the next morning, the same funeral Missouri would have given one of her own sailors. His crew, who wanted revenge and not ceremony, were furious. Callaghan held firm. The men then did something remarkable: they gathered scraps of red and white cloth and sewed a makeshift rising sun flag so the pilot could be buried under his own colours. His body was cleaned, wrapped in canvas, and laid on a tray at the rail, Marine riflemen fired a salute, a bugler played taps, and the tray was tipped into the sea. It is the only known instance of American forces holding a military funeral for a kamikaze pilot.

What makes the order harder to comprehend is what it had cost Callaghan personally. Two and a half years earlier, his older brother, Rear Admiral Daniel Callaghan, had been killed by a Japanese shell on the bridge of the cruiser USS San Francisco at Guadalcanal, and was buried at sea himself. The captain who insisted on honouring an enemy had every reason to hate one. Eighty years later the decision still resonates. President Barack Obama cited it at Pearl Harbor in 2016 as proof that people must resist demonising those who are different even when hatred burns hottest, and in April 2025 American and Japanese officials, along with Callaghan's grandsons, gathered on Missouri's fantail to mark the 80th anniversary of the burial.

08/30/2026

Broken Into Three, Scattered Over a Mile, Guns Still Aimed

USS Lexington was scuttled by her own side on 8 May 1942, after gasoline vapour from ruptured fuel lines touched off explosions that spread beyond anything her damage control parties could handle. Around 2,700 men came off her in one of the calmest abandonments in naval history, and 216 did not. A destroyer finished her with torpedoes and she went to the bottom of the Coral Sea. It took 76 years and six months of searching before Paul Allen's research vessel Petrel found her on 4 March 2018. When the news broke, one of the first statements came from Admiral Harry Harris, then head of US Pacific Command, whose own father had been among the men taken off her that day.

She lies about 3,000 metres down, roughly 800 kilometres off the eastern Australian coast, and she is not in one piece. The main section sits upright on the bottom. A mile to the west the bow and stern lie across from each other, and her bridge sits on its own between them. An ROV confirmed her identity by putting a camera on the nameplate on her stern. Her paint has held remarkably well for 76 years underwater, her five-inch anti-aircraft guns are still trained outward as though waiting for something to come, and eleven of the 35 aircraft she carried have been found scattered around her, Devastators, Dauntlesses and Wildcats, with the national star insignia still visible on the wings. One Wildcat carries the Felix the Cat badge of Fighting Squadron 3 and four Japanese kill flags painted on the fuselage.

08/30/2026

The only U-boat ever raised after being sunk in combat

The salvage of U-534 in August 1993 was never really a treasure hunt, whatever the newspapers said. It was a bomb disposal job on a scale few teams ever attempt. The Dutch firm Smit Tak spent more than four weeks in the Kattegat lifting a 1,500 ton submarine from around 67 metres down, and what she carried made every stage delicate. Roughly five tons of explosives had to be removed from her, including torpedoes sitting armed in their tubes and racks since May 1945. Divers rigged heavy lifting straps beneath a hull that had spent 48 years settling into silt, then a floating crane raised her slowly enough to avoid tearing a boat too fragile to take strain.

What she gave up instead of gold was history in near perfect condition. The oxygen-poor silt had sealed her, preserving around two tons of documents, three experimental T11 acoustic homing torpedoes of which only 38 were ever built, letters home, diaries, photographs, board games, even a cocktail shaker. Eight of her own survivors watched her break the surface on 23 August, along with four men from the RAF crew that had sunk her. She was desalinated at Grenaa to stop her corroding the moment air touched her, then taken to Birkenhead in 1996, where she remains today.

08/30/2026

Rusting in the Mud, With No Way Out and No One Coming

There is no restoration underway on USS Ling (SS-297), no funded plan, and no date for anything to change. The Balao-class submarine remains where she has sat since 1973, grounded in the mud of the Hackensack River in New Jersey, listing with the slope of the bank, with holes rusted clean through her hull at bow and stern and not enough water beneath her to float. Preservation New Jersey named her one of the state's 10 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2025, which recognises the danger without doing anything about it. The last serious rescue effort came around 2020, when a group launched a campaign to prepare her for transport and tow her to a dry dock, with volunteers patching a three-inch hole, cleaning her interior, and getting her horn and a dive klaxon working again. Their stated goal was to have her out and down river within two months. That was six years ago, and she has not moved.

The reason nothing happens is the same reason it never has. The channel beside her runs only a few yards before it meets a low drawbridge that seldom, if ever, opens, and the river is far too shallow for a boat drawing nearly 17 feet. Restoration in place is impossible, removal is blocked by geography, and no one has produced the money to solve either. Add the 2018 break-in that left her flooded and stripped, the sale of the surrounding land for development, and an owner who stopped responding, and the picture is complete stalemate. Commissioned on 8 June 1945, too late for combat, Ling later served as a training boat and spent four decades restored to her 1945 appearance as the centrepiece of the New Jersey Naval Museum. Today she is a rusting hulk visible from a nearby bridge, still listed on paper as New Jersey's official naval museum.

08/30/2026

The MoD promised to preserve her, then sold her for £2 million

In 2012 the Ministry of Defence announced that HMS Illustrious would be preserved for the nation once she left service. Four years later she was sold to a Turkish scrapyard. The carrier known throughout the fleet as L***y had given 32 years and over 900,000 nautical miles, commissioned at sea on 20 June 1982 as she sailed south to relieve her sister Invincible after the Falklands, then serving over Bosnia, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan operations, and delivering aid after Typhoon Haiyan. When her white ensign came down on 28 August 2014 she was the oldest ship in the active fleet, and Britain would have no carrier at all until the Queen Elizabeth arrived in 2017.

The preservation promise died on arithmetic. A 2013 MoD solicitation for museum proposals produced no workable bid, hull repairs alone were estimated at over £10 million before any berthing, maintenance or visitor infrastructure, and a final fundraising attempt collapsed in November 2016. She went to LEYAL Ship Recycling of Aliaga for around £2 million, roughly £120 per tonne, the same yard that had already broken up her sister Ark Royal in 2013. On 7 December 2016 she left Portsmouth under tow for the last time, arriving at Aliaga late that month, and by March 2017 much of her hull and superstructure had been reduced to scrap. All three Invincible class carriers are now gone.

08/30/2026

A battleship and a destroyer met in the fog off Virginia

On a foggy Sunday afternoon, 6 May 1956, the USS Wisconsin was turning during exercises off the Virginia Capes when the destroyer USS Eaton tried to overtake her. The 57,000 ton battleship sliced into the Eaton's starboard bow forward of the bridge, breaking the destroyer's keel and flooding an engine room. The Eaton lost her entire bow and had to be towed stern-first to Norfolk. The Wisconsin, with a 30 foot rip in her own bow, made it in under her own power, carrying injured men from the Eaton in her sick bay.

The repair became one of the neatest tricks in American shipbuilding. Sitting unfinished at Newport News was the USS Kentucky, an Iowa class battleship cancelled after the war with her hull complete. Workers cut a 120 ton, 68 foot bow section off the Kentucky, barged it across the river, and welded it onto the Wisconsin, the whole job taking 16 days, with the cutting itself done in about 48 hours. Sailors called the result the Wisky, Wisconsin plus Kentucky. The graft also made her America's largest battleship at 889 feet, two feet longer than the Iowa, Missouri and New Jersey.

08/30/2026

Four Years, $75 Million, and 700 Tons of New Steel
USS Texas (BB-35) has spent four years in a Galveston shipyard undergoing the largest repair of her life, and the numbers tell you how close she came to being lost. When she was towed to Gulf Copper in August 2022, the last dreadnought on earth was leaking so badly that pumps ran constantly to keep her afloat, and crews pumped roughly 750,000 gallons of expanded foam into her just to get her through the 40-mile tow. Since then they have replaced more than 700 tons of steel, cut out deeply embedded corrosion, rebuilt the torpedo blisters along her flanks, and made her hull watertight again, work that has now run past 400,000 hours of labour at a cost of around $75 million. She was refloated in March 2024, and by early 2026 the Battleship Texas Foundation could say something nobody had said in decades: the ship has no leaks.
What surprised the crews was where the damage came from. Her external underwater hull, and even the protective coating from her 1988 dry-docking, turned out to be in decent shape. She was corroding from within, decades of trapped moisture quietly eating her steel where no diver could ever see it. Above the waterline she has been repainted in the blue and black she wore coming home from the war in 1945, right down to the number 35 on her bow. Commissioned in 1914 and the only surviving battleship to fight in both World Wars, from convoy duty in the First to Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa in the Second, she is now being readied to move to her permanent berth at Pier 15 in Galveston, where the foundation plans to reopen her to the public.

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