Lipski family

Stanley Walter Lipski (center) at the Finnish front, 1940

After emigrating to the mill town of Northampton, Mass., in 1907, Antoni Lipski adjusted to his new American life quickly. Born in Grodno (now Belarus) on March 6, 1882, Lipski settled in the Ox Bow neighborhood of Northampton looking southward toward Mt. Tom and began a long career working at Mount Tom Sulphite Pulp Company. In July 1909, he married 18 year-old Marta Maciejewska, a fellow immigrant and mill operative herself, and began a large family. When Martha died in 1928, just 37 years old, she left Antoni to care for ten children. Antoni died of leukemia in the Westfield State Sanitorium on Sept. 14, 1953.

A graduate of Northampton High School, the Lipskis’ eldest son Stanley Walter Lipski was appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1935. Multilingual and an expert in the Russian language, Lipski served briefly at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., before assignment to a succession of highly sensitive posts. He served in the American legation in Berlin until the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and then went on to posts in Moscow, Riga, and Helsinki, where he served as assistant naval attache to Finland and Sweden.

In March 1943, Lipski was ordered to sea duty aboard the Portland-class cruiser USS Indianapolis, the flagship of the Fifth Fleet serving in the central Pacific. In 1945, the Indianapolis was designated to deliver Little Boy, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, from Honolulu to the staging site on Tinian island. Four days after delivering the bomb, the ship was struck by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine and sank in only 12 minutes, and in the greatest loss of life at sea in a single incident in American history, 880 members of the crew of 1,196 were killed in action. Lipski was severely injured in the initial blast, but died after a day in the water. He had earned nine battle stars, a Purple Heart, and Silver Star during his service.