Com-Central.net

http://www.williammaloney.com/Aviation/Aviationindex.html

I just found this website while looking for Aberdeen pictures (one never has enough Aberdeen pics..)

You'll find here great armour walkarounds from the following places :

Aberdeen
AAF Museum at Danville
Canadian War Museum
Military Museum of Southern New England

there also many many airplanes and boats. Really a must-see !!

P-O

Nice find, P-O, thanks!

I checked the U.S.S. Slater and other ship pages, but don't find the old destroyer/mine sweeper that used to be moored in the Mississippee downtown in St. Louis when I was in grad school there (let's not talk about the years). Does anybody know what became of that one? I looked on Google Earth and don't see anything that looks like that.

I remember touring that one and thinking, "Gee, these are really small, don't think I'd care to go into deep water in something like this."

Doug

I think 'THE ARK' is in Turkey..... HA HA HA


Don

fantastic link, thanks very much

Good find P-O,
I especially like the pics from when they moved the M48 Patton.

BTW, I found this flickr album to be a pretty good & detailed set of pics of the Ordnance Museum

www.flickr.com/photos/...474291167/

Neil

Answered my own question, and the answer was indeed, strange....

The Strange, Strange tale of the U.S.S. Inaugural

but....

...and this is just sad.....

"Details blur with the passage of time, so exactly when Noel Stasiak came into possession of a Navy anti-aircraft gun is really a matter of conjecture. It may have been 1998. Perhaps it was 1999. Surely it must have been sometime during the administration of former St. Louis Mayor Clarence Harmon (1997-2001), because Stasiak says he talked to the mayor about donating the piece of artillery to the city. courtesy Robert O'Brien
Launched in 1944, the Inaugural participated in the bloody fight for Okinawa.
courtesy Robert O'Brien

The U.S.S. Inaugural served as a St. Louis tourist attraction from 1968 until the flood of 1993.

U.S.S. InauguralFor decades, the 40-millimeter gun graced the St. Louis riverfront aboard the U.S.S. Inaugural, a decommissioned World War II minesweeper that served as a tourist attraction from 1968 to 1993.

During the flood of 1993, the ship broke free of its moorings, crashed into the Poplar Street Bridge and eventually came to rest on the banks of the Mississippi River, just south of downtown. Seven weeks later, it rolled on its port side and sank. The Inaugural is still with us, a rusting hulk languishing a mere twenty yards from the Missouri shoreline. When the river is low, nearly three-fourths of the ship pokes above the water.

A chief petty officer in the Navy Reserves, Noel Stasiak keeps his flattop as trim and neat as a new recruit's. He quotes the Sailor's Creed — "honor, courage, commitment" — and turns maudlin when lamenting the Inaugural's shallow grave. "She deserves a proper funeral," he says. "To let her just wallow in the mud like a beached whale! It's appalling. It's sacrilegious."

With his acquisition of the anti-aircraft gun in the late 1990s, Stasiak thought he'd secured a lasting tribute to the Inaugural. He hauled it down to a friend's warehouse off South Broadway and, for the better part of a year, worked piecemeal restoring the inoperable weapon.

When he finished the job, Stasiak would give the gun to the Soldiers Memorial downtown. He hoped that future generations might remember the Inaugural and its storied past. But Stasiak's plan never came to fruition. One night — Stasiak thinks it was in 1999 — a thief crashed through the gate of the warehouse, hooked the gun to a truck and drove off. "Poof," Stasiak says. "Just like that, it was gone."

Stasiak maintains that he and the property owner reported the break-in to police. He says the officers who responded all but laughed at their claim. "They were like, 'Yeah, right, someone stole a five-ton anti-aircraft gun? We'll get right on it.'" No police report is on file.

The story could have ended there — a crime left unsolved. Then, on January 2 of this year, Stasiak sat down to read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. On the front page was a story headlined "Romantic wants to raise minesweeper that sank south of downtown." The article recounted John Patzius' plans for the Inaugural....."

And then, it gets weird.....(seven-page story)

Doug, that's definately a strange and twisted turn of events.


That ship is visible on Microsoft Virtual Earth (at least I think that's it)

Dennis,
Yep, that's it. It's but a barely discernable ripple of water on Google Earth (water was higher). Difficult to imagine that no effort was made to retrieve when it was still afloat, and was allowed to lie where it sank for so long.

On the subject of ships--my brother was in the Navy stationed near San Francisco. He knew guys who had to go out and check on the mothball fleet anchored in Suison Bay. They always remarked how spooky it was, to walk around in those deserted ships.





(That's USS Iowa, bottom center)

Amazing...