USS Lawton

USS Lawton First appearance Kong: Skull Island

The USS Lawton is a fictional United States Naval vessel which is mentioned in the 2017 MonsterVerse film Kong: Skull Island. Its destruction at the hands of a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism in 1943 precipitated the foundation of Monarch several years later, and led its sole surviving crew member Bill Randa to join the organization.

History

MonsterVerse

Kong: Skull Island

In 1943, the USS Lawton was a vessel operated by the United States Navy during World War II in the Pacific. The ship was attacked and destroyed by a huge unidentified creature, leaving Bill Randa as the only survivor. Due to the nature of the attack, the U.S. government covered up the incident and officially declared that the Lawton was sunk by the Japanese. One year after the war's end, in 1946, U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered General Douglas MacArthur to create a task force in order to further investigate the sinking of the Lawton and other similar recent incidents involving Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, or MUTOs. This task force, dubbed Monarch, was the first mixed Japanese-American unit formed since the war. Randa, still fixated on the sinking of the Lawton, joined Monarch by 1952 in order to prove to the world that monsters existed and prevent similar attacks in the future. He maintained that the creature which sank the Lawton had "no conscience" and only destroyed, and came to fear that ancient superspecies like it would return to reclaim the world from mankind unless they fought back.

Trivia

• The identity of the creature which sank the Lawton has never been revealed. While it is widely speculated by fans to have been Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stated in an interview with Toho Kingdom that he did not intend for him to be the culprit but rather imagined that the Lawton was sunk by a previously-unseen original monster.
• The USS Lawton is omitted from Kong: Skull Island - The Official Movie Novelization; instead, Bill Randa joins Monarch as a result of a lifelong interest in myth kindled by his global travels during his World War II service.

References

This is a list of references for USS Lawton. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: ^[1]

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