During the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, the Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku struck the US aircraft carrier USS Lexington with two torpedoes, severely damaging its hull.
Crews aboard the Lexington were forced to abandon ship before a powerful internal explosion set the vessel ablaze — but some sailors had different priorities in mind.
Four decades later, then-retired US Navy Adm. Noel A.M. Gayler, one of the Navy's first fighter aces who served aboard the Lexington, recalled the moments before Lady Lex sank to its watery grave.
"We were driven by the fires to the extreme end of the ship," Gayler told Paul Stillwell, a historian at the US Naval Institute, in a 1983 interview. "The ship's service ice cream plant was in the extreme port corridor. Some clown passed the word that there was free ice cream, so sailors were abandoning ship and lining up for free ice cream."
Gayler added: "Of course, they puked it up as soon as they'd been swimming in salt water [for] a while."
Merle Lebbs, an electrician's mate on board the Lexington, said he was among those who polished off the ice cream containers evacuating the vessel.
Lebbs told local Oklahoma news station KFOR that, after the captain issued the order to abandon ship, a warrant officer broke the lock on a freezer door and handed out vanilla ice cream to a dozen or so sailors.
"He didn't think anything of it because we were abandoning ship. We just figured we might as well do it," he said.
In a 2002 interview for the US Naval Institute, George Von Hoff, then a 21-year-old sailor aboard the doomed Lexington, said he was among the hundreds of crewmen rescued by the destroyer escort USS Hammann.
Von Hoff said the Hammann then transferred the Lexington's crew to the Northampton-class cruiser USS Chester to receive "clean clothes, a bunk, and much-needed food."
"We hadn't eaten anything that day except ice cream, which I ate out of my helmet," he said in the interview.