At 3,460 tons each, these Gearing Class destroyers were 390 feet long, and powered pairs of General Electric steam turbines, plus four boilers for 60,000 horse power. The Philippine Sea was screened by USS Brownson (Commander H.M.S. Four-inch, 2.5-inch, and 1.5-inch steel armour protected her 888-foot-long hull, hanger deck and conning tower. In addition to the Philippine Sea’s 100 fighters, dive- and torpedo-bombers, she bristled with arrays of five-inch artillery and 40-mm Bofor anti-aircraft guns. At 27,100-tons, she was among the largest aircraft carriers afloat, powered by eight boilers and four Westinghouse geared steam turbines for a combined 150,000 horse power and a range of 20,000 nautical miles. Cornwell commanding her 3,448 officers and enlisted men. Its flagship was the USS Philippine Sea, Captain Delbert S.
But eleven months later, a huge armada departed US waters on 26 August 1946 for Antarctica. With the words, “these proceedings are closed,” US General Douglas MacArthur, representing the victorious Allies, accepted Imperial Japan’s surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri on 2 September 1945, thereby officially concluding the Second World War. I was determined now to investigate this truly bizarre event with the sole aim of discovering, if possible, what really happened – to discard every groundless speculation, hearsay or obvious fantasy – by narrowing my research exclusively on hard data and credible information only from reliable sources. These far-fetched claims long convinced me that the subject was unworthy of consideration, until I was recently shocked to learn how the US Navy actually did launch nothing less than a secret, full-scale invasion of Antarctica less than a year following the Second World War, and under highly suspicious circumstances that have never been fully explained, even after the passage of nearly seven decades.
Having authored several 20 th century military histories, 1 possibilities for such a confrontation seemed to me unlikely in the extreme, an impression deepened by some writers, who insisted the Germans were piloting “flying saucers” around the South Pole. Like many New Dawn readers, I occasionally heard rumours over the years of firefights alleged to have taken place between United States armed forces and technologically superior Nazi naval units in, of all places, Antarctica, soon after the Second World War. This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 5 (October 2012)
0 kommentar(er)
