Mutsu was the second of two Nagato-class dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the end of World War I. Named after Mutsu Province, the ship was launched on 31 May 1920. In 1923, a year after commissioning, she carried supplies for the survivors of the Great Kantō earthquake. The ship was modernised in the mid 1930s with improvements to her armour and machinery, and a rebuilt superstructure in the pagoda mast style. Other than participating in the battles of Midway and the Eastern Solomons in 1942, where she saw no significant combat, Mutsu spent most of the first year of the Pacific War in training. She returned to Japan in early 1943. That June, one of her aft magazines detonated while she was at anchor, sinking the ship with the loss of 1,121 crew and visitors. The navy conducted a perfunctory investigation into the cause of her loss, concluded that it was the work of a disgruntled crewmember, and dispersed the survivors in an attempt to conceal the sinking within Japan. Much of the wreck was salvaged after the war and many of its artefacts and relics are on display in Japanese museums.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Mutsu
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1223:
Mongol invasions: Mongol forces defeated a combined army of Kiev, Galich, and the Cumans at the Kalchik River in present-day Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Kalka_River
1879:
Gilmore's Garden in New York City was renamed Madison Square Garden, the city's first venue to use that name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Square_Garden_(1879)
1902:
The Second Boer War came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Vereeniging
1935:
An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 Mw struck Balochistan in the British Raj, now part of Pakistan, killing between 30,000 and 60,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Quetta_earthquake
1981:
An organized mob of police and government-sponsored paramilitias began burning the public library in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, destroying over 97,000 items in one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Jaffna_Public_Library
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
wont: One's habitual way of doing things; custom, practice. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wont
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Time, always without break, indicates itself in parts, What always indicates the poet is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their words, The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark, but the words of the maker of poems are the general light and dark, The maker of poems settles justice, reality, immortality, His insight and power encircle things and the human race, He is the glory and extract thus far of things and of the human race. The singers do not beget, only the Poet begets, The singers are welcom'd, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the Answerer, (Not every century nor every five centuries has contain'd such a day, for all its names.) --Song of the Answerer https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass#Song_of_the_Answerer_.281855.3B_1856.3B_1881.29