MILESTONES: February 26, birthdays for Erykah Badu, Tim Kaine, Marshall Faulk
Brooklyn Today
Greetings, Brooklyn. Today is the 57th day of the year.
On this day in 1944, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page reported that the American Allied fighters downed 142 Nazi planes and destroyed the Germans’ aircraft assembly plant. The same front page featured a story about the launch of a 27-thousand-ton ship to be christened the Bennington. Built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it was the 11th carrier class ship to be built since the Pearl Harbor attack. Its keel was laid 14 months earlier. A ship’s bottom-most structural section, the keel runs along the ship’s center line from the bow to the stern. The laying of the keel is also the occasion of great ceremony for builder and owner alike, as it heralds the formal recognition of a ship’s construction. In 1954, the Bennington was seriously damaged when a series of explosions killed more than a hundred crewmen and injured more than 200 others. The cause was a leak of hydraulic fluids from the catapult, which were then ignited by the flames of a jet preparing for takeoff. This tragedy prompted the Navy to switch from hydraulic to steam fluid when launching aircraft.
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