the original wasn't hit by torpedoes.
The original
Roberts deliberately put itself somewhere a DE shouldn't be and was shredded by naval gunfire. Close range knife fights similar to that are why I find the early Solomons campaign so interesting. Dramatic as hell and real.
Like our older, more hip cousins usually do the Brits came up with degaussing. Plus they had the need for it a bit earlier than we did. I remember having a Radio Shack wand I used to degauss the 8-track tape heads for my fancy high tech stereo when I was a kid - to ensure that all the high fidelity it had stayed that way.
Jessup probably saw a ship, maybe even the
Eldridge being degaussed and that's what gave him the idea for
The Philadelphia Experiment. And a good one too - one of my favorites from back when. Now that I blew the dust off it it'll get another read through. As a little kid stories like that plus
Argosy magazine and
Weird War had me all fired up.
Last Podcast on the Left #268 had me LMAO over it all and regardless of whether you believe it really happened or not that podcast was entertaining.