HAPPY BERTH-DAY!
Vets hail Intrepid’s 75th yr.
She’s looking pretty good for a 75-yearold nicknamed “the Decrepit.”
More than 300 former crew members feted the 75th anniversary of the everstalwart USS Intrepid at Pier 86 Thursday, marveling at how the “most frequently hit carrier” in the Navy is still shipshape.
“I’m proud of it. It’s taken a lot to keep it in this shape,” said Dan Watkins, 93, an original crew member who toiled in the vessel’s boiler room from 1943 to 1946.
“I’ve always been proud of the Intrepid. She kept me safe plenty of times, like my wife — she keeps me safe, too.”
Watkins survived four kamikaze attacks and a torpedo strike that, all told, claimed the lives of 270 sailors.
“I was on the Intrepid for all of World War II. Every time we got hit, I was on board,” he said.
The Essex-class carrier and its toughas-nails crew of 3,400 souls helped turn the tide in the Pacific Theater, later going on to hamstring Viet Cong supply chains, recover returning NASA spacecraft and hunt Soviet subs.
On its “darkest day,” in Nov. 26, 1944, two Japanese kamikazes battered the Intrepid back to back.
“You could feel them slam into the ship,” Watkins said. “The second one ripped through the deck into the hangar deck. It caused such a bad fire that we had to push all 40 planes over the side.” Sixty-nine sailors died. “Anyone who talks to a member of this crew is always struck by their humility,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson.
“They will tell you, ‘I was just doing my job,’ but I will tell you it was a big damn deal. You saved the world from tyranny not once but several times.”
Living up to its name, the Intrepid once limped nearly 2,500 miles from Micronesia to Pearl Harbor on a juryrigged sail after a Japanese torpedo disabled her rudder, he said.
“Is this true?” Richardson asked aloud after recounting the tale on the flight deck Thursday. “Yes, admiral!” one veteran shouted. Construction on the 872-foot-long carrier began on Dec. 1, 1941, less than a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7.
The Navy decommissioned her in 1974, and she was about to make a one-way trip to the scrap heap when philanthropist Zachary Fisher bought the boat and transformed it in 1982 into the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
“In my family, I was told that this is the Lady in the Harbor who bled so the other Lady in the Harbor could hold that torch,” said nephew Ken Fischer.
Another original crew member, Ed Coyne, 92, of Inwood — who operated flight-deck phones from 1943 to 1946 — said he’s proud of the ship’s stewards.
“We actually saved the ship. We put out the fires, we helped keep her afloat. But the ones who came up with the money, they saved this ship too,” he said, with a tear in his eye.