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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

9. Ship on Fire and Sinking? Grab Some Ice Cream Before Leaving

USS Lexington (CV-2) leaving San Diego, California, 14 October 1941. National Archives.

The USS Lexington (CV-2), nicknamed “Lady Lex”, was an early US Navy aircraft carrier. Commissioned in 1927, she joined the Pacific Fleet, with which she spent her entire career. Luckily for the Lexington, she and the other Pacific Fleet carriers were at sea when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941, and so escaped damage.

However, Lady Lex’s luck ran out on May 7^th, 1942, when she was crippled by Japanese carrier planes during the Battle of the Coral Sea, then caught fire. In the ship’s dying moments, a warrant officer broke the lock on a freezer, and started handing out ice cream. As an eyewitness recalled: “He didn’t think anything of it because we were abandoning ship. We just figured we might as well do it“. Sailors in the vicinity gorged on vanilla ice cream, polishing off entire containers, before heeding the order to abandon ship and lowering themselves into the water.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.