“Don’t shoot, we’re Republicans”

Here’s an interesting bit of history I found this morning from the always entertaining “Finestkind Clinic and Fish Market“ about the US Navy ship William D. Porter that almost sunk President Roosevelt;

Sometimes the things that almost happened are as interesting as the things that did. Nearly every photo history book of World War II shows the famous picture of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt meeting with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at Tehran in November 1943. The accompanying caption usually mentions something about the meeting solidifying the alliance that would go on to win World War II. Rarely mentioned, however, is that the historic moment might never have occurred — because the president, the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and numerous other top American leaders on board USS Iowa were nearly victims of a torpedo attack on the way to the summit.

[…]

After 1943 the ship was commonly hailed by other ships with the greeting: “Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans!” Willie Dee became a black sheep, and sailors like Bill Glover, a 17-year-old from Montgomery, Ala., when he joined the destroyer in 1944, were not happy about being assigned to it. “In less than a year after launching, it had done several things we heard about, so I didn’t want to go to the Porter,” he said. “They acknowledged it when I got on board, laughed about it some. Nobody had gotten hurt, so you could joke about it some. And plus, there was a war on so we had other things to do.”

Read the whole story at History Net – it’s long but interesting.

Category: Historical