Firing the big guns on the USS Helena

"The night had been still and inky black a moment before," Chick Morris wrote. "Now suddenly it was a blazing bedlam. The Helena herself rared and lurched sideways, trembling from the tremendous shock of recoil. In the radio shack and coding room we were sent reeling and stumbling against bulkheads, smothered by a snowstorm of books and papers from the tables. The clock leaped from its pedestal. Electric fans hit the deck with a metallic clatter. Not a man in the room had a breath left in him." If this was the effect of the ship's gun work on the men who were practicing it, one can imagine what life might have been like on the ships they were hitting.
(from Neptune's Inferno, by James D. Hornfischer)


USS Helena