Saturday, August 15, 2015

USS Samuel B. Roberts DE 413

Wikipedia gives this ship just a short note and this:

In popular culture

The television show Star Trek Deep Space 9 featured a starship named "Samuel B. Roberts" in the 1999 episode "What You Leave Behind". The Miranda-class cruiser appears briefly as a background ship during the final battle of the Dominion War.[citation needed]
The ship has been subject of scale model kits:
  • 1/700 scale plastic model kit, by PitRoad / Skywave.[4]
  • 1/16" scale wood model kit by BlueJacket Shipcrafters, Inc.[5]

USS Samuel B. Roberts 

I have an issue with that. A huge one. Very few combat units can boast a sacrifice of this scale--basically, a kamikaze. The only one which comes to mind is Russian light cruiser Varyag, which came to fight Japanese squadron  outside Chemulpo in 1904, being, together with cannon boat Koreetz (Korean), outnumbered 2 to 14. Russians made a movie, a German, stunned by Russian heroism, wrote a song, which became a cult song in Russia/USSR for more than a century. Yet, the US Navy's small (1,350 ton) destroyer escort, who fought as a battleship against overwhelming odds in the Battle Off Samar, as part of Taffy III, never got a movie by freaking Hollywood. Some big mouth US General, who never saw any serious action against first rate Wehrmacht at the peak of its might, and who is really irrelevant to the outcome of WW II, gets an Oscar movie (granted acting genius of George C. Scott) Patton, and the ship which performed a feat of heroism, rarely equaled in history, remains merely a model. No song, no movie and, yet, she helped to win the battle and sunk fighting against overwhelming odds. Anyone finds something wrong with this picture? I do. 

Hollywood version of WW II is appalling in its lack of understanding of what real war is. But we should know better and call them as we see it. Little destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts remains forever in the pantheon of true military heroes.

   

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