Warship sinks before it can be sunk in US-Philippine drills
The 80-year-old vessel, however, would not quite make its own funeral.
Onlookers instead watched as the ship, which once chased Japanese submarines and ferried German prisoners as part of the US fleet, sank before the first volley could be fired.
"The Balikatan 25 maritime strike targets vessel sank off the west coast of the Philippines prior to the event commencing today," Philippine Navy spokesman John Percie Alcos said in cancelling a planned media event.
"Due to rough sea conditions ... and with its long service life... she took on a significant amount of water and eventually sank," he said.
Praising it as one of the most-decorated ships in Philippine history, Mr Alcos added the country was proud to be "transitioning to a new and multi-capable navy".
After more than 20 years of service, the vessel - then named USS Brattleboro - was sold to the Republic of Vietnam in 1966.
The Philippine Navy acquired and refurbished the ship after its crew fled Vietnam following the 1975 fall of Saigon.
Balikatan, three weeks of US-Philippine joint exercises aimed at deterring Beijing's ambitions in the disputed South China Sea, is set to end Friday.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Irish Sun
a day ago
- The Irish Sun
Final pics show Japan Airlines Flight 123 mins before crash that left 520 dead… & the critical failure that spelled doom
FOUR decades on, the doomed Japan Airlines Flight 123 crash remains one of the world's worst aviation disasters of all time. Haunting final pictures show the jet just moments before it crashed because of a critical failure - killing 520 people on board. 7 A photo taken by a witness on the ground appears to show Flight 123 missing its tailfin Credit: Wikipedia 7 The last photo taken on board the fatal Japan Airlines flight shows oxygen masks hanging Credit: Reddit 7 The plane was headed to Osaka after departing Tokyo Credit: Reddit Tragedy struck on August 12, 1985 when the Boeing 747SR-46 jet crashed just 62 miles northwest of Tokyo. On board the jet were 509 passengers and 15 crew members. Only four of them survived. The flight, dubbed the "Titanic of Japan", took off from Tokyo and was headed to Osaka but tragically crashed in the remote area of remote mountain area of Mount Takamagahara. read more aviation disasters BALL OF FIRE 25 children killed along with teacher & pilot as jet crashes into school And to date, it remains the worst disaster in the history of Japanese aviation. One of the last few pictures shows the Jet missing its tailfin. Another picture, thought to be the final picture taken on board, shows oxygen masks hanging from the ceiling. It is thought that the plane was perfectly fine, and the journey began normally after all the routine checks. But just 12 minutes after takeoff, First Officer Yutaka Sasaki and Captain Masami Takahama noticed a tremor tear through the plane. The jet decompressed rapidly, which caused the ceiling near the rear bathrooms to collapse. How pilots cutting engines sparked TWO plane disasters after South Korea & India crashes as calls for cockpit CCTV grow It extensively damaged the fuselage and destroyed the plane's vertical stabiliser and all four hydraulic lines. Moments after the tremor was detected, the air condensed into a fog, forcing the oxygen masks down. For a terrifying 30 minutes, the pilots fought hard to claim control of the plane, but the jet was in a vicious and disorienting cycle of falling and then rising. Passengers shouted as they were thrown around the plane by the rapid spiralling, while the pilots fought to bring the jet to safety. But the out-of-control plane continued to descend and got closer to the mountains, where it crashed and exploded. 7 According to reports, Captain Takahama made a last-ditch effort to keep the aircraft aloft by using the engine thrust to ascend and fall. He is believed to have yelled: "This is the end!" Around 20 minutes after impact, US Air Force serviceman Michael Antonucci reported the crash site. In the aftermath of the crash, the search and rescue efforts were delayed, and survivors were not found until several hours later. This delay likely contributed to the high death toll, as some victims who survived the initial impact died before help could arrive. Japanese officials delayed sending a rescue crew, assuming that no one had survived, and told Antonucci not to discuss the disaster. 7 Japan Airlines (JAL) flight 123 crash site Credit: Getty 7 Members of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force in a rescue operation at the crash site at the ridge of Mount Takamagahara Credit: Getty - Contributor 7 Photo dated 13 August 1985 shows a wing from the Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 that crashed Credit: AFP The Japanese military only sent rescue teams in the following morning, a whole 12 hours after the crash had been reported. Antonucci revealed a decade later: "Four people survived. Many more could have. "At the time it occurred, I was ordered not to speak about it." One doctor involved in the rescue mission said: "If the discovery had come 10 hours earlier, we could have found more survivors." Yumi Ochiai, a survivor, claimed to have heard other survivors wailing all through the night, until the intense cold finally got to them. Antonucci added that had it "not been for efforts to avoid embarrassing Japanese authorities", a team of US Marines could have searched the wreckage less than two hours after the crash. The puzzle began to come together as more teams were dispatched to retrieve body and plane parts. Two years later, after a comprehensive investigation, Japan's Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission determined that the decompression was caused by a botched repair by Boeing workers. The same aircraft had thudded heavily upon landing at Itami Airport in June 1978, causing extensive tail damage. The impact also cracked open the pressure bulkhead, necessitating immediate repairs. However, Boeing's repair personnel utilised two spice plates parallel to the break in the bulkhead instead of one, rendering the repair job worthless. According to Ron Schleede, a member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, the crew did everything they could to avoid the disaster, which was "inevitable".
Irish Independent
a day ago
- Irish Independent
‘We Were There' review: Veterans of ‘forgotten war' in the Far East have their final say in VJ Day documentary
It's a simple on-screen coda listing the names of 10 contributors to the film who have since died. Given that the interviews were conducted over a six-year period, when some were nearing or had already passed the age of 100, it was inevitable not all of them would still be with us when the programme was broadcast. If anything, this just underlines the importance of the documentary, which is the latest in Rachel Burden's excellent series of oral histories. Television documentaries about the war tend to be heavily weighted in favour of the European conflict. The result is that the war in the Far East and the Pacific – which raged on until August 15, 1945, four months after Germany surrendered, and was characterised by some of the most savage fighting of the whole conflict – is often relegated in the public mind. What did it matter to us if the German war started or finished? The outbreak of jubilation on VE Day wasn't shared by many of the battle-weary combatants who, having helped defeat Germany, found themselves shipped out to fight the Japanese. 'What did it matter to us if the German war started or finished?' says Reg Holbrook, who served with the fleet air arm. 'We were thousands of miles away.' The first that James Fenton of the royal artillery heard of the war in Europe being won was when he received a letter from his brother describing the VE Day celebrations in the streets. Adrian Rouse, an officer with the British Indian army who joined up with a group of borstal boys from Wolverhampton ('I learned a lot from them,' he says, 'including how to pick locks'), recalls that when the news came through, 'everyone got a bit pissed'. Then it was back to the fighting. The Japanese attack on Pearl Habour in 1941 was the turning point that finally pushed America into joining the war. Forty minutes earlier, however, the Japanese had launched the invasion of Malaya (now Malaysia). Royal marine Jim Wren, then just 21, was on a battle cruiser when it was hit by a bomb. Luckily for him, it crashed through three decks before exploding. 'It was every man for himself,' says Wren, who spent a couple of hours floating in the ocean after the cruiser tipped over. Hundreds of men, his comrades and friends, died. Wren looks at the floor and quietly says: 'I'll never forget them.' For these people, the horrific experiences of a lifetime ago are as vivid as if they'd happened yesterday. The fighting in Singapore, Hong Kong and Rangoon, the capital of Burma (now Myanmar), all of which fell to the Japanese, was brutal. The terrain was difficult, the heat was unbearable, there were snakes everywhere, dysentery and malaria were rampant, and the Japanese were a particularly vicious enemy. 'Their attacks were pretty much suicidal,' says Robin Rowland, then a young officer with the 14th Army, led by Lieutenant-General William Slim. The Japanese didn't take prisoners. In one especially barbaric incident, they bayonetted every patient at a field hospital. The tide of war in Burma was turned by the 14th, which was the most multicultural, multi faith military force ever assembled. The immensity of its achievements haven't always been acknowledged, though, which is why it's often referred to as 'the forgotten army' that fought 'the forgotten war'. Away from the heat of battle, the worst atrocities were inflicted on the captured soldiers used as slave labour to build the Thai-Burma railway. In total, 100,000 died, often from exhaustion and starvation. The testimonies of those held for years in internment camps, such as Olga Henderson, who was 10 when she and her family were captured, are no less shocking than those of the combatants. Henderson recalls crossing a bridge and being horrified by the sight of the heads of Allied soldiers which the Japanese had stuck on spikes. In the closing moments of this remarkable documentary, past and present fuse for Henderson when she talks about recently seeing an image on TV of a young girl begging for food, just as she once had to. She breaks down. 'What have we done?' she sobs. 'What are we doing to the world? Nothing has changed.'
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Irish Examiner
Cork artist inspired by uncle who was on the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki
Patrick Penney's installation at the Crawford College of Art & Design's Degree Show in June took an unusual subject; his granduncle William Penney's involvement in the Manhattan Project and the deployment of the first atomic bombs in August 1945. William Penney, born in 1909, was a British professor of mathematical physics at the Imperial College London when he was invited to help devise what became known as the Mulberry harbours during World War II. These were two prefabricated harbours used to facilitate the unloading of cargo during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Penney was then asked to join the Tube Alloys project, the British nuclear weapons programme. 'Originally, the British, the Americans and the Canadians worked separately on developing nuclear weapons,' says Patrick Penney. 'Then they agreed to co-operate, and William was seconded to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He helped mainly with the construction of the Fat Man plutonium bomb, the one that was dropped on Nagasaki. 'He was the only British member on the committee for selecting targets, and he was a scientific observer on the flight over Nagasaki when they dropped the bomb on August 9, 1945.' The bombing of Nagasaki came three days after that of Hiroshima, eighty years ago today. Although William Penney did not witness that incident, the first ever deployment of a nuclear weapon, he visited Hiroshima shortly after the Japanese surrender on August 15. 'I used copies of his handwritten notes from Hiroshima in my Degree Show installation,' says Patrick Penney. 'The photographs and prints in the installation were based on photographs he took in the city. Then he went back and gave a lecture in Los Alamos on what he'd observed of the effects of the atomic bomb.' Part of Patrick Penney's installation, showing his granduncle William Penney. Patrick Penney never met his granduncle. He first learned of William Penney's achievements when he came across a folder of obituaries his father was given when he began working at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire. 'One of the things that sparked my interest is that William burned all his papers shortly before he died of thyroid cancer in 1991, which was probably down to the effects of radiation. Everything that exists is only a copy. Copies made by the government or by secretaries or by other third parties.' William Penney had hoped to return to academia after the war, but he was persuaded to continue working on nuclear research at Aldermaston. 'William was the director of the weapons programme. He had a really pretentious title; he was called the CSAR, the chief superintendent of armament research. He finally retired from Aldermaston in 1967 – it took him 20 years to get away - and became the Director of Imperial College in London. But, even then, he was retained as a consultant. He 'held an office at AWRE,' was how they put it.' Although Patrick Penney's aunt and uncle, as well as his father, all worked for AWRE at Aldermaston, 'they didn't have much of a relationship with William. I think my father would have met him, when he came to visit the building, but William had already retired by then. He lived in East Hendred, thirty miles away.' William Penney married twice and had two sons. 'It's one of those weird quirks; he was eventually made a lord, and then he was made Baron Penney before he died, but the titles are not passed down through lineage. I know his children attended his funeral, but then they became private again. They would be in their 80s now, and may well have children and grandchildren of their own. I haven't really tracked his family. That would be something to look into.' Patrick Penney grew up in West Cork. 'My father is English, and my mother is Irish. They moved back in the 1990s, and I was born here. We live just outside Bantry.' He is almost surprised to find himself pursuing a career as an artist. 'Originally, I intended studying automotive technology and management in MTU. But then I applied for the Crawford and got in. A lot of this has been completely unexpected.' Much of his Degree Show installation was based on material he discovered in the National Archives at Kew. 'I was there for four days last summer. I had a look at 18 files that referenced William's name, but there were 80 in total. I'll be starting a master's in contemporary art practice shortly, and I hope to carry on my research. I'm going back to the archives this month, and there's a couple of more places that I'd like to try and get into. The photographs and some of the files in my installation were only declassified in 2010. There's more stuff that is still technically classified, but this is up for review. 'I'm hoping that, if I can say I'm a postgraduate researcher, and put in the freedom of information requests, I might be able to get access to more information. I'm hoping to be able to establish for a fact that William was at Aldermaston at the time of the big CND anti-nuclear marches in the 1950s and '60s, for instance. It'd be interesting to compare one side to the other.' Part of Patrick Penney's installation, based on photographs his granduncle took in Hiroshima. Penney believes his granduncle must have had mixed feelings about his role in the nuclear arms race. 'In my Degree Show installation, there was a barrel with a book on the top of it. That had a quote was from what he wrote after he witnessed the Nagasaki bomb. He said, we have contributed to a monster that will consume us all. 'What he did was objectively terrible, there's no getting around the fact of that. But there's still an argument over whether dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was worth doing. It's conservatively estimated that if the Americans had had to land in Japan, then at least a million people would have been killed, if not more. So it's complicated, but I think the overall consensus is that it was not good.' Penney plans to exhibit his Degree Show installation again next month. 'I've talked to Mich Moroney at the Swerve Gallery in Skibbereen, and I hope to show it there on Culture Night, September 19.' He has other exhibitions planned as well. 'At the Degree Show, I got an award for GOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art, in Waterford. I think there'll be a group show there with me and Danny Foley, another artist who was in my year, and probably a couple of more from SETU. And then there'll be an MTU STEAM exhibition during Science Week at the James Barry Centre at MTU Bishopstown in March or April. So hopefully there'll be chances to show the material again.'
