pagesofhistory Into the Deep
In January 1960, Navy Lt. Don Walsh went where no one had been before — or since. Now, 50 years later, he’s honored for his dive to the Pacific Ocean’s deepest place.
O
n Jan. 23, 1960, then-Lt. Don Walsh, USN, and Swiss ocean- ographer Jacques Piccard boarded
the Trieste, a deep-diving bathyscaphe, and sank down 35,800 feet until it touched the bottom of a gorge, known as Challenger Deep, in the Pacific Ocean floor. At almost 7 miles down, it is the deepest place in all the world’s oceans. Some 50 years later, in a ceremony at
the National Geographic Society in Wash- ington, D.C., April 14, Walsh received the Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award and the society’s gold-plated Hubbard Medal. The following day, he was honored at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, where the Trieste is on display in the museum. Walsh, now 78, says he was just a
young Naval officer trying to escape a dull job on a submarine tender. He was work- ing at a Navy installation in San Diego when a volunteer was called for to join Piccard, the son of the Trieste’s designer, August Piccard. In January 1960, the Trieste was towed south of Guam to the ocean site above Challenger Deep. The men who sat inside a refrigerator-size compartment car- ried a change of clothes and 15 chocolate bars. Once they reached the bottom, they
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
■ On July 27, 1953, an armistice signing at Pan- munjom, on the North Korea/South Korea border, halted the Korean War. That date in 1995, President Clinton and South Korean President Kim Young Sam dedicated a Korean War memorial in Washington, D.C.
PHOTO: STEVE NICKLAS/NOS/NGS
shook hands and took pho- tos of each other, but they only could stay for about 20 minutes. The trip, down and back, took about eight hours. Piccard died two years ago at the age of 86, and Walsh remains the only person alive to have been to Challenger Deep. Other vessels have vis- ited the deep but never with humans on board.
Remembering the Holocaust
S
ome 120 veterans who liberated Nazi concentration camps
during World War II gathered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Wash- ington, D.C., in April to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the end of the war. Museum officials called it one of the larg- est gatherings of liberators ever held. In the final months of the war, service-
members from several armored and infan- try divisions liberated camps throughout Germany and Austria, finding cremation ovens, bodies stacked in railcars, and starving survivors. The veterans, many of whom now are
in their 80s and older, traveled to Wash- ington, D.C., for the week’s National Days of Remembrance, which culminated in a ceremony in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda with Army Gen. David H. Petraeus as the featured speaker. MO
J U LY 2 0 1 0 MI L I T A R Y O F F I C E R 6 1
Then-Lt. Don Walsh, USN, left, sits with Jacques Piccard on the bathyscaphe Trieste.
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