World War II
When Japan attacked her base on 7 December 1941, Minneapolis was at sea for gunnery practice about 20 mi (32 km) from Pearl Harbor. She immediately took up patrol until late January 1942 when she joined a carrier task force about to raid the Gilberts and Marshalls. While screening Lexington on 1 February, she helped turn back an air attack in which three Japanese Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" medium bombers were shot down. She screened the carriers during their successful raids on 20 February and again on 10 March, when they blasted Japanese shipping at Lae and Salamaua, disrupting enemy supply lines to those garrisons.
Read more about this topic: USS Minneapolis (CA-36)
Famous quotes containing the words war ii, world and/or war:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“When they are not at war they do a little hunting, but spend most of their time in idleness, sleeping and eating. The strongest and most warlike do nothing. They vegetate, while the care of hearth and home and fields is left to the women, the old and the weak. Strange inconsistency of temperament, which makes the same men lovers of sloth and haters of tranquility.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)