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During a thunderstorm on August 12, 1970, this tug boat pulled a Liberty Ship loaded with nerve gas rockets on the Cape Fear River as the beam shines in the distance from North Carolina’s Oak Island Lighthouse.
For some strange “secret” reason, the captured nerve gas was transported for storage in the United States at the end of the war. The 12,500 rockets were placed in 418 concrete coffins on board the Liberty Ship LeBaron Russell Briggs and brought off the coast of Florida where the vessel was sunk in the Atlantic Ocean nearly 25 years after the weapons were captured.
Although this was a sad end to one of the 2,400 surviving Liberty Ships from World War II that were credited with saving England from Nazi occupation, it was a just and final end to Nazi Germany’s weapons of mass destruction that were captured by the Allies at the conclusion of World War II.
Although the Liberty Ships were called ugly by most, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they were vital in saving England in its darkest days before the United States officially entered the war. They were named after American Revolutionary War patriot Patrick Henry’s reported words, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Oak Island Lighthouse, built in 1958 to replace the Cape Fear Lighthouse on Bald Head Island, which was subsequently demolished, the Oak Island Lighthouse, from 1958 to 1962, was the brightest lighthouse in the United States and the second brightest in the world. The lighthouse is now owned by the town of Caswell Beach. To learn more about the lighthouse, you can go to www.OakIslandLighthouse.org.
This story appeared in the
May/Jun 2014 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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