Yeah 'spaw, we'd all like to have eplanations of how these things occur. Back in 64 I was on our only carrier and at 16 the youngest man at sea in our navy. ( We could enlist at 15.5 in those days )We ran right over one of our destroyers during night flying operations, cut her clean in half and she quickly sank. 96 sailors out of a crew of 300 were lost. Still our biggest peacetime maritime disaster. It took two royal commissions of enquiry ( equiv. to your senate enquiries I guess ) to come up with the reasons as to how it happened. This was a terrible tragedy. Probably only about 8 to 10 thousand personnel in the navy at the time. We knew most of the sailors that were killed. The standing joke back then was that, as our navy was so small, we didn't official service numbers - we all knew each other !
JG F.M.E.
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