Finished drawing the light cruiser Juneau. I do like all of the design for her.
Juneau, a name so unfortunate to be remembered. Named after the capital city of Alaska, she was commissioned in February 1942. On her commissioning day, the Rogers brothers and the Sullivan brothers watched her start her career together. She cherished them as if they were four-leaf clovers. The young light cruiser regard them as her glory, without thinking that her career could come to an abrupt end.
Juneau liked nice clothes. She wore nice camouflage from the start of her service and was repainted several times during her nine-month service, with the superstructure experimentally changed to haze grey in June. Even to this day, in the photos of the wreck, you can still see the gray paint adorning her naval guns as before.
She witnessed the rapid sinking of Wasp while escorting her in September, rescuing her crew. She played her most important role with her sisters in the subsequent Battle of Santa Cruz — sending numerous 5-inch cannonballs into the sky. She formed an anti-aircraft defense net for Hornet, later for Enterprise. In the following month she followed San Francisco to protect the Henderson Field, and that was the beginning of her unfortunate ending.
She was hit by a torp in the melee late at night on November 13, but survived the night and retreated slowly in the morning. The bruised Sterett looked at her from a distance and marvels at her beauty and sophistication ("She's like a big destroyer!"), but the next moment she was – all of a sudden - gone.
"I saw her main guns go up a few hundred feet and where the water fell - there was nothing there. I tried to search the sea for possible surviving crew members, but I didn't see anything. And Helena didn’t allow us to stop the search either—the enemy submarine might still be waiting for us,” Sterett recalled sadly.
And we all know what happened after that.