How One Sailor’s “FORBIDDEN” $0.42 Patch Made 37 Torpedoes FAIL in One Night

May 18th, 1943. In the middle of the night, 240 miles southwest of Guadalcanal, a Japanese Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedo tears an 8-foot hole in the side of USS Laffey. The forward fireroom floods in seconds, bulkheads groan, and the captain is told the ship will be on the bottom in 15–20 minutes. Damage control manuals say there’s only one thing left to do: abandon ship.

One machinist’s mate refuses.
This video tells the true story of Frank Novak, a steelworker from Pittsburgh who ignored the book, grabbed scrap plate, rigging boards and an underwater torch, and swam under a sinking destroyer to weld on a 4-by-3-foot steel patch that should never have worked — but did. That “stupid, suicidal” idea became the prototype for a $0.42 emergency hull patch that would quietly save 23 destroyers and 1,840 crewmen across the Pacific.

In this documentary you’ll see:

How the Long Lance torpedo turned US destroyers into floating coffins with a single hit.

Why mattresses, collision mats and wooden plugs almost never stopped deep hull ruptures.

How Novak’s improvised steel plate and underwater weld bought Laffey the minutes she needed to live.

How admirals first called the method reckless… then ordered every damage control team in the Pacific to learn it.

How that cheap “steel hack” turned hopeless hits into survivable damage and rewrote US Navy damage control for decades.

This isn’t a story about an admiral or a secret super-weapon.
It’s about one exhausted sailor, a 42-cent piece of steel, and the night he decided he’d rather drown under the hull than watch his ship and her crew disappear.

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#WW2 #History #Navy #Destroyer #PacificWar