Uss Maine Sinking Quotes

Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year’s Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley’s script for the film version of his novel. Sackler’s main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945 (in the film, Quint errantly states the date as “June the 29th, 1945”).

Few could dispute Esther Ross’s claim that the Arizona was a cutting-edge weapon of its day. The behemoth was built to project American power and counter any aggressor on the high seas. Battleships made completely of steel were themselves relatively new. America’s earliest were the Texas and the Maine, commissioned within a month of each other in 1895. Barely over three hundred feet in length and displacing only sixty-seven hundred tons, they in retrospect have been termed coastal defense battleships or, in the case of the Maine, a mere armored cruiser. The Maine blew up under mysterious circumstances in Havana Harbor, Cuba, in February 1898, and its sinking became a rallying cry during the subsequent Spanish-American War. Short-lived though the war was, it underscored the importance of a battleship Navy. In one storied episode, the two-year-old battleship Oregon raced from the Pacific coast of California all the way around Cape Horn and into the Atlantic to take part in the Battle of Santiago off Cuba. It was a bold display of sea power, but the roundabout nature of the voyage set thirty-nine-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt to thinking about the need for a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. By 1900, the United States Navy floated five battleships and had seven more under construction. Beginning with the Indiana (BB-1), commissioned at the end of 1895, they were each given the designation “BB” for battleship and a number, usually in chronological order from the date when their keels were laid down. Save for the anomaly of the Kearsarge (BB-5), all bore the names of states.

Then, Japanese pilots found the range, and five bombs struck the ship. Three hit forward of Turret No. 1 and left the bow a mangled mess. One of these ignited a gasoline storage tank and started a blaze that might have proven as catastrophic as that on the Arizona but for the fact that as part of a regular ammunition rotation, the Nevada’s crew had yet to reload twenty-eight hundred bags of powder into its main magazines. The other two bombs exploded at the base of the main mast and smokestack, damaging the director stations on the foremast. Rather than risk the ship sinking and blocking the entrance channel, the senior officer afloat ordered the Nevada to beach near floating Dry Dock No. 2, adjacent to Hospital Point.

On February 17, 1898, Captain William T. Sampson, USN was the President of the Board of Inquiry, investigating the explosion that sank the USS Maine. On March 26, 1898, he was given command of the Navy’s North Atlantic Squadron, with the temporary rank of Rear Admiral. Aboard the flagship USS New York, he sailed to Havana from Key West where he bombarded the city for several days, resulting in minor damage to the city. As part of his duties, he sealed Havana harbor and supervised the blockade of Cuba. At the time it was erroneously believed that the USS Maine was sunk by Spain. It was only recently that continuing investigation determined that the sinking was really caused by a bunker fire smoldering in the bituminous coal used for fuel. The fire heated the bulkhead separating the engine room from a magazine containing the powder bags used to fire the 10” guns. It was the resulting explosion, rather than Spanish mine that sank the USS Maine, killing 261 officers and crew out of the 355 men that manned the ship. It took over ten years before the USS Maine was refloated and towed out to sea, clearing the harbor. She was again sunk at a location, where she now rests 3,600 feet below the surface.