USS Indianapolis (CL/CA-35) was a Portland-class heavy cruiser of the United States Navy, named for the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. Launched in 1931, it was the flagship for the commander of Scouting Force 1 for eight years, then flagship for Admiral Raymond Spruance in 1943 and 1944 while he commanded the Fifth Fleet in battles across the Central Pacific during World War II.
Bismarck was the first of two Bismarck-class battleships built for Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine. Named after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the ship was laid down at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg in July 1936 and launched in February 1939. Work was completed in August 1940, when she was commissioned into the German fleet. Bismarck and her sister ship Tirpitz were the largest battleships ever built by Germany, and two of the largest built by any European power.
Robert Duane Ballard is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.
HMHSBritannic was the third and final vessel of the White Star Line's Olympic class of steamships and the second White Star ship to bear the name Britannic. She was the youngest sister of the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. She was operated as a hospital ship from 1915 until her sinking near the Greek island of Kea, in the Aegean Sea, in November 1916. At the time she was the largest hospital ship in the world.
Operation Rheinübung was the last sortie into the Atlantic by the new German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen on 18–27 May 1941, during World War II. This operation aimed to block Allied shipping to the United Kingdom as the previously successful Operation Berlin had done. After Bismarck sunk HMS Hood during battle of the Denmark Strait, it culminated with the sinking of Bismarck, while Prinz Eugen escaped to occupied France port. From that point on Germans would rely only on U-boats to wage the Battle of the Atlantic.
HMS Hood was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy (RN). Hood was the first of the planned four Admiral-class battlecruisers to be built during the First World War. Already under construction when the Battle of Jutland occurred in mid-1916, that battle revealed serious flaws in her design despite drastic revisions before she was completed four years later. For this reason, she was the only ship of her class to be completed, as the Admiralty decided it would be better to start with a clean design on succeeding battlecruisers, leading to the never-built G-3 class. Despite the appearance of newer and more modern ships, Hood remained the largest warship in the world for 20 years after her commissioning, and her prestige was reflected in her nickname, "The Mighty Hood".
The Battle of the Denmark Strait was a naval engagement in the Second World War, which took place on 24 May 1941 between ships of the Royal Navy and the Kriegsmarine. The British battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Hood fought the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which were attempting to break out into the North Atlantic to attack Allied merchant shipping through the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland.
Sink the Bismarck! is a 1960 black-and-white CinemaScope British war film based on the 1959 book The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck by C. S. Forester. It stars Kenneth More and Dana Wynter and was directed by Lewis Gilbert. To date, it is the only film made that deals directly with the operations, chase and sinking of the battleship Bismarck by the Royal Navy during the Second World War. Although war films were common in the 1960s, Sink the Bismarck! was seen as something of an anomaly, with much of its time devoted to the "unsung back-room planners as much as on the combatants themselves". Its historical accuracy, in particular, met with much praise despite a number of inconsistencies.
The R/V Akademik Mstislav Keldysh is a 6,240 ton Russian scientific research vessel. It has made over 50 voyages, and is best known as the support vessel of the Mir submersibles. The vessel is owned by the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and is homeported in Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. Named after the Soviet mathematician Mstislav Keldysh, it usually has 90 people on board. Among its facilities are 17 laboratories and a library.
The last battle of the German battleship Bismarck took place in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 300 nautical miles west of Brest, France, on 26–27 May 1941 between the German battleship Bismarck and naval and air elements of the British Royal Navy. Although it was a decisive action between capital ships, it has no generally accepted name. It was the culmination of Operation Rheinubung where the attempt of two German ships to disrupt the Atlantic Convoys to the United Kingdom failed with the scuttling of the Bismarck.
Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli journalist, New York Times best-selling author and documentary filmmaker.
Titanic: The Complete Story is an American documentary chronicling the story of the ocean liner RMS Titanic which sank on its maiden voyage in 1912. It is a compilation of a four-hour documentary special produced by A&E Television Networks in 1994. A&E Home Video originally sold the entire documentary in a 4-tape VHS set and later a DVD release. It is considered by many critics and historians to be the definitive documentary regarding the Titanic. It is most famous for being one of the few Titanic documentaries to feature survivors.
Unsinkable Sam is the nickname of a ship's cat who purportedly served during World War II with both the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy and survived the sinking of three ships.
David Louis Mearns, OAM, is an American-born United Kingdom based marine scientist and oceanographer, who specializes in deep water search and recovery operations, and the discovery of the location of historic shipwrecks.
Jonathan David Stack is an American documentary filmmaker. He is also a co-founder of World Vasectomy Day.
102 Minutes That Changed America is a 102-minute American television special documentary film that was produced by the History channel and premiered commercial-free on Thursday, September 11, 2008, marking the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Its name comes from the timespan from the first impact of American Airlines Flight 11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center. The film depicts, in virtually real time, the New York-based events of the attacks primarily using raw footage from mostly amateur citizen journalists, focusing mainly on the reactions of New York inhabitants during the incident. The documentary is accompanied by an 18-minute documentary short called I-Witness to 9/11, which features interviews with nine firsthand eyewitnesses who captured the footage on camera.
The wreck of the Titanic lies at a depth of about 12,500 feet, about 370 nautical miles south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland. It lies in two main pieces about 2,000 feet (600 m) apart. The bow is still recognisable with many preserved interiors, despite deterioration and damage sustained hitting the sea floor. In contrast, the stern is completely ruined. A debris field around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from the ship as she sank. The bodies of the passengers and crew would have also been distributed across the sea bed, but have since been consumed by other organisms.
Titanica is a 1992 IMAX documentary film about the RMS Titanic. The film was directed by Stephen Low and narrated by Cedric Smith, Anatoly Sagalevich and Ralph White. The film mostly focuses on footage taken at the wreck of the RMS Titanic, also featuring footage of the expedition crew searching the wreck as well as interviews with Titanic survivors Frank John William Goldsmith and Eva Hart. Using Eva and the crew members, Low conveys the voice of the documentary by showing the Titanic's wreckage as a graveyard which is to be respected and treated with caution and care. It was the second feature-length IMAX film released, following Stones at the Max in 1991. An edited 40 minute version of the film was also later released for IMAX theatres in 1995; this version had new narration by Leonard Nimoy, though it retains most of White's narration. This edited version later became the basis for another edited version released in 1997, featuring 27 more minutes of interviews with Ralph White, Emory Kristof, and other experts.
Corporal Dwayne Hicks, also known mononymously as Hicks, is a fictional character in the Alien franchise. First appearing in the film Aliens, he was portrayed by actor Michael Biehn. The character is a Senior Corporal of the United States Colonial Marine Corps aboard the USS Sulaco and is one of only four survivors of the Sulaco crew's expedition to LV-426, along with Ellen Ripley, Rebecca "Newt" Jorden and the android Bishop. Hicks was initially killed during the introduction of the film's sequel Alien 3, a decision that garnered negative backlash from fans of the franchise. Hicks was later rewritten to have survived, as he returns as the main protagonist of the "Stasis Interrupted" DLC in the videogame Aliens: Colonial Marines and as a side character in the game's main story.
