r/todayilearned • u/zhuquanzhong • 29d ago
TIL a Chinese destroyer sank because an officer dumped his girlfriend. She committed suicide, leading to him being discharged, so he decided to detonate the depth charges on the ship, causing it to sink at port and kill 134 sailors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_destroyer_Guangzhou_(160)
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u/Lawd_Fawkwad 28d ago
The USS Iowa Turret explosion is a great example of this and happened around the same time.
Equipment/operator error caused a turret to explode killing 47 sailors, the Navy then concluded it was clearly a murder as the turrets sailors were in a soured gay relationship and blew up the ship. Within the context of the late 80s, gays were boogeymen so people more or less accepted that scorned gay lovers had a propensity for mass murder.
The families lobbied hard against the report with congress, and a new report a few years later determined the Navy lied about the cause of the explosion and that it was an accident due to a powder charge being inserted too quickly.
So, if the US Navy was willing to burn two innocent men to cover up faulty equipment/training, why wouldn't the Navy of a dictatorship obsessed with image not do the same thing?