Friday, April 22, 2011

It's enought to make a Navy veteran cry!


Courtesy of a link provided by Commander Salamander, we find this auction at Government Liquidation:

3,360,000 lbs approx Steel Gun Tubes, the shipping cradles and railroad rails that the gun tubes are sitting on are also included in weight and sale. Demilitarization is a condition of sale for Gun Tubes only.




Property located at Hawthorne Army Depot, NV, 89415. Qty 14ea Tubes and weigh approx 236,900 lbs ea and are 816 inches long, Tube thickness being approx 15in. at the breach and 4in. at the muzzle.




All DEMIL will be performed on site before property may leave.




Clean up of all foreign materials and debris in the surrounding work area are required for buyer to fulfill his responsibility for removal. Local disposal of debris and foreign materials are not permitted.




Buyer load.


There are more details and photographs at the link.

Yes, those are 16"/50 Mark 7 gun barrels manufactured for the World War II Iowa class battleships.










These are probably the last such barrels in existence, except for those mounted aboard museum ships like the USS Missouri, shown below at her moorings at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.




That's a lot of metal - and Navy and artillery history - headed for the smelter. We won't see the like of those guns again.

Peter

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very very sad. I doubt we even have the capability to make these anymore.

Reminds me of something I read a while back about a Father talking to their child. The Father was lemeting that when he was a child, you could fly from New York to Paris in just a few hours and that men went to the moon. But not anymore...

Anonymous said...

What will Cher ride now?

Good thing they have to be DEMIL'd first. Don't want the ATF selling them to a Mexican cartel so they can claim to have seized over three million pounds of firearms.