The Day Old Frankie took the Plunge

Some 105 years ago, 18 July 1921, off the Virginia Capes Successive leisurely flights of land-based Army and Navy bombers dropped an assortment of bombs over the moored and abandoned 6,600-ton German Wiesbaden-class scout cruiser SMS Frankfurt, formerly of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, and (eventually) sank same. To help with aimpoints, she even conveniently had two round targets painted on her deck, fore and aft. From the Alfred A. Cunningham Collection (COLL/3034) at the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division Frankfurt, commissioned in October 1915, survived Jutland specifically, the Great War as a whole, and even scuttling at Scapa Flow. She was hard to kill. The German Wiesbaden-class scout cruiser SMS Frankfurt, late 1918, Scapa Flow. IWM (Q 64195) Ceded to the U.S. as a war prize on 11 March 1920 in England, commissioned there on 4 June as USS Frankfurt, she was towed to the East Coast and disposed of via SINKEX. Capable of over 27 knots on a 31,000shp plant, she was…