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Occurring just twelve days before the end of the war, the loss of the USS Indianapolis to torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 represented the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy. The event has been dramatized and eulogized, perhaps most famously in a chilling scene from the 1975 film Jaws. But in the face of mistakes and incompetence came self-sacrifice and heroism that deserves to be remembered.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
