The Battle of Midway is often remembered as triumph of codebreaking; and it was. But victory on that June 4 was not automatic. It still required the the Navy’s squadrons to go in. One of them, Torpedo 8, was annihilated down to the last airplane. Wikipedia has the bare details.
Torpedo Squadron 8 (VT-8) was a United States Navy squadron of torpedo bombers assigned to the Air Group operating from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8). … VT-8′s first and best-known combat mission came during the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. Flying the vulnerable Douglas TBD Devastators, Commander John C. Waldron‘s 15 planes were all shot down during their unescorted torpedo attack on four Japanese aircraft carriers. The squadron did not destroy any enemy aircraft with their rear .30-caliber machine guns, nor did they damage any of the Japanese carriers.
All members of Torpedo Squadron 8 who flew from the Hornet on that day perished in the action, with the exception of Ensign George Gay. Torpedo 8 was afterwards awarded the American Presidential Unit Citation. … However, it is possible that the act of drawing away the Japanese Zero fighters during the doomed attack allowed a subsequent wave of American dive bombers to later sink three of the four Japanese carriers.
The Hollywood director John Ford, who was taking movie footage for the Navy (Ford was wounded on Midway Island itself) during the naval engagement, subsequently produced a short film memorializing the men of Torpedo 8 for their families. It is after the “Read More”.
embedded by Embedded Video
YouTube Direkt
What happened after Torpedo 8′s last attack.
Gentlemen,
Thank you. May we prove worthy of your sacrifice. God Bless You All.
Midway Anniversary Tribute
…and in the comments:
Vice President Bush Calls World War II Experience “Sobering”
Forty-one years ago, a 20-year-old Naval Aviator named George Bush embarked on a mission which he would later describe as one of the most dramatic moments of his life — an experience which gave him a “sobering understanding of war and peace.”
“There’s no question that it broadened my horizons,” Vice President Bush said recently. “And there’s no question that today it has a real impact on me as I give advice to the President.”
It was September 2, 1944. Lieutenant Junior Grade George Bush was a pilot with Torpedo Squadron Fifty-One (VT-51 ) aboard the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto (CVL-30), a light carrier which was deployed in the North Pacific
Just two years earlier, on June 12, 1942, Bush had graduated from high school and joined the Navy as a seaman, second class. But, in less than a year, he completed flight training at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas, was commissioned an ensign, and went on to fly TBM Avengers with VT-51.
For a time, he was the youngest pilot in Naval Aviation.
On that sunny morning of September, Bush woke aboard San Jacinto prepared to fly one of the 58 attack missions he would fly during the war. However, this particular mission would end a little differently than his other 57.
The target was a Japanese radio station on ChiChi Jima, located about 600 miles southwest of Japan in the Bonin Islands. For a time, the enemy on that tiny island had been intercepting U.S. military radio transmissions and warning Japan and occupied enemy islands of impending American air strikes. It had to be destroyed…
The Battle of Midway is a perfect example of For Want Of A Horseshoe Nail. If the search plane from the cruiser Tone had not had catapult trouble and had gotten off on time, the Japanese would have spotted the Americans before Nagumo ordered the raid on Midway, and the whole timeline of the battle would have changed. The Japanese might have even won the battle, they might have sunk the American carriers instead of their carriers being sunk. The Japanese, in that case, would have taken Midway and possibly invaded Hawaii. But the timeline was what it was: Torpedo 8 brought the Zekes down on the deck just as the dive bombers arrived overhead.
Had the Japanese won the Battle of Midway, the war would have taken longer, but would never have been in doubt. The Japanese never believed they could conquer the United States, but they did believe they could conguer enough of the Pacific to throw an impregnable line of fortified islands through which the Americans would have to fight, leading to a stalemate and a negotiated peace, with the Japanese in possession of much of their gains. What they did not understand, as Victor Davis Hanson points out, is that by sucker punching us at Pearl Harbor they aroused a fury such as they never envisaged. They had no idea of the Western Way of War, in Hanson’s phrase, and what was in store for them. The current Muslim leadership would do well to study the Battle of Midway and the savagery of the Pacific war, and heed what will happen to them, for they too have no conception of The Western Way of War.
In addition to the 15 2-Man Devastators, Torpedo 8 was augmented by 5 of the 3-Man TBF Avengers flying off Midway Island. Five of these were lost along with all their crews.
One made it back to Midway too heavily damaged to fly again. One crew member (Manning) was dead but the other two, Ernst and Ferrier wounded but alive. Surviving the landing was as miraculous as having survived the Zekes.
All in all, 41 torpedo planes launched that day. Only six returned. And those dive bombers were down to pints of fuel when they finally made their run.
But the real miracle? As Doc Hanson has related, that was the fact that the Yorktown
was there at all. After Coral Sea, she was towed into Pearl for a 90-day (minimum) repair job that was finished in 68 hours.
Recently read an impressive book on the battle “Shattered Sword” which updates the tale.
interesting tidbits such as,
when overlaying searchlines and US positions, it appears another japanese plane should have spotted the Americans long before the Tone plane (which was off course did)
The primary effect of the torpedo plane attacks was to disrupt japanese air ops. They kept Nagump cycling CAP when the Japanese wanted to be prepping/spotting a counterstrike.
When the 3 carriers were taken out by the Yorktown/Enterprise SBDs, they were still 30-45 minutes from being ready to launch.
That was a classy thing for John Ford to do for the families. I am sure they must have appreciated it greatly.
(I just hope none of the guys was Jewish … what with the playing of “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the soundtrack!)
Can you imagine *any* Hollywood director, let alone one with Ford’s equivalent status, doing the same thing today?
“After Coral Sea, she was towed into Pearl for a 90-day (minimum) repair job that was finished in 68 hours.”
Perchance … was the chief engineer named Scotty?
“She’ll take three months minimum, Cap’n.”
“Scotty, you’ve got 68 hours.”
(resigned grimace) “Aye, Cap’n. I’ll do ma best.”
Valuable lesson from history. MSM says Gulf of Tonkin “incident” didn’t happen.I say it did. They weren’t there. I was. Check the history books in our schools…MSM is winning the argument. Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.(History buffs will supply that quote source.)
Where will we find such warriors today? The new CiC tells the Pentagon to cut its budget by 10 percent while Congress votes itself a $93,000 raise to “stimulate” the economy.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/30/defense-official-obama-calling-defense-budget-cuts/
I like the argument made by one of the characters in Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (the German General commenting on the war), that The Battle Midway won the war True, the Russians may have bore the brunt of the battles against the Germans, but after the Battle of Midway, Japan’s defeat was just a matter of time and permitted Roosevelt to concentrate efforts on defeating Germany.
@Bogiewheel #7:
And in “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” when Trooper Smith, a former Confederate General, dies, a homemade Stars and Bars is placed on his bier along with the Stars and Stripes.
And then he is eulogized as “a fine soldier and a Christian Gentleman”.
Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) is drawn from
Ranald McKenzie of the 4th Cavalry and “Trooper Smith” represented the fact that about 1/3 of that regiment were Johnny Rebs who refused to take the damnasty oath.
The movie represents the Fourth’s Southern Column of 1874 which defeated the Commanches by capturing and killing all their horses.
T. R. Fehrenbach points out how that campaign made it an honor again to wear the blue in the southern states. Just in time for the XXTH Century challenges.
John Ford’s politics tilted to port. But he always recognized valor and honored it.
What they did was not in vain. The yellow holocaust began then to burn less brightly. Japan then was not a car and TV trading partner. They were a gruesome and terrorizing enemy with hate to spare.
Forgiveness is very American. It is not always deserved. We have little to apologize for and I do not need to apologize to Iran. They should learn that there are very few Cold Harbors in American history and those are battles that we usually fight against ourselves.
The thing that really jumped out at me in the film was the first appearance of a TBD. It is taxiing with wings folded. The insignia on the underside of the wing has the red dot in the center of the white star, while it has been deleted from the fuselage insignia. I have never seen both versions of the insignia on the same plane before.
My father, a Coral Sea veteran, always said that the red dot was removed from the insignia because shipboard gunners kept mistaking it for the Japanese “meatball”. He said it was removed before the Coral Sea battle, but every photo I’ve ever seen of the Lexington’s airplanes showed the red dot. I’ve never been able to determine exactly when it was removed. Since Coral Sea was a two-day battle, I’ve long harbored a suspicion that it was a field modification rather than a top-down order. Maybe after the first day, the red dots of the Lex’s planes were painted over with white and this later became standard practice.
But why would the Hornet’s planes (at least one of them) still have it on the underside of the wings at Midway a month later?
George Gay lived to a rather ripe old age, and when he died, per his request, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the section of ocean where ‘Ron 8 died, to all but the last man.
They were brave men, going to war in obsolete aircraft, and they knew it. They lost co-ordination with the SBD’s and attacked alone, bringing down all the Japanese air cover on the ocean deck to shoot them down.
“Died trying” are maybe the noblest words that can ever be said about any man; to give up his life doing what he thought was right and his duty.
Re Walt’s ”want of a horshoe” another that is striking is the Dauntless formation that in four minutes sank the three EOJ fleet carriers, very nearly missed them, flying near the fuel point of no return when they spotted a lone wake far below. This wake was visible because it was a flank speed wake; the lone EOJ destroyer throwing it up was trying to catch up with the main body. The reason it was separated from the main body was that earlier in the day an American submarine –what was its name –had been detected shadowing the fleet and the destroyer had been detailed to veer off and sink it or drive it away. The attack (mixed, drove it away but did not sink it) cost some hours and resulted in the destroyer pointing the way to the fleet for the American dive bombers high overhead.
Re: #9 Frank Siegler: I would be very interested in your info on Gulf of Tonkin incident. I believed it at first, but more recently have come to accept the MSM re-telling of it. If you have something more, please share or let me know and I’ll send a personal email address so you can just send it to me. Very interested. F
Frank Siegler @ #9; that must be bitter indeed, to have to see lies slowly covering over the truth of an action you were part of.
Jonathan Swift wrote: “Considering the natural disposition in many men to lie, and in the multitudes to believe, I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim, so frequent in every body’s mouth, that ‘Truth will at last prevail.’” The effect of so many lies, said Swift, was “to corrupt our manners, blind our understandings, drain our wealth, and in time destroy our constitution both in Church and State; and we at last [are] brought to the very brink of ruin; yet by the means of perpetual misrepresentation, have never been able to distinguish between our enemies and friends.”
Midway@nationalgeographic.com – This is an extraordinary site.
With narrative, photos, and video, it tells how the Navy, National Geographic, and undersea explorer Robert Ballard, who led the scientific team which located RMS Titanic, searched for and finally found on the Pacific’s bottom the carrier, USS Yorktown, which was sunk by torpedo fire on June 6 after suffering severe damage earlier in the battle
Before 0900, Bush and two aircrewmen (his regular radioman, Radioman Second Class John Delaney, and substitute gunner Lieutenant Junior Grade William White) strapped themselves inside an Avenger and catapulted off San Jacinto. Three other bomb-laden VT-51 aircraft, as well as a number of VF-51′s F6F Hellcats, joined the mission.
“I was replaced by Ltjg. White at the last minute,” said Leo W. Nadeau, then an ordnanceman second class who flew as Bush’s gunner on all but two of his attack missions. “As intelligence officer, White wanted to go along to observe the island.”
“The antiaircraft (AA) fire on that island was the worst we had seen,” he said. “I don’t think the AA fire in the Philippines was as bad as that.”
“ChiChi was a real feisty place to fly into,” Stanley Butchart, a former VT-51 pilot and friend of Bush, agreed. “As I remember, it had gun emplacements hidden in the mountain areas. In order to get down to the radio facility, you had to fly past the AA batteries, which was risky business.”
As expected, projectiles belched from the enemy’s AA batteries as soon as Bush and his squadron mates were over the island. Tiny black puffs of smoke thickened around his plane as he approached the target and dove steeply — so steeply that Bush felt like he was standing on his head. But before he reached the radio facility the plane was hit.
Ltjg. Bush, who felt the plane “lift” from the hit, continued his dive toward the target and dropped his payload. The four 500-pound bombs exploded, causing damaging hits. For his courage and disregard for his own safety in pressing home his attack, he was later awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Bush maneuvered the Avenger over the ocean with the hope it would make the journey back to San Jacinto. But the plane began to blaze and clouds of smoke soon enveloped the cockpit. Choking and gasping for air, Bush and one of his aircrewmen wriggled out of the plane and leaped from about 1,500 feet. His other crewman, dead or seriously injured from the blast, went down with the Avenger.
Bush parachuted safely into the water, dangerously close to the shore. Unfortunately, the aircrewman fell helplessly to his death because his parachute failed to open properly.
No one ever knew which one bailed out with Mr. Bush,” said Nadeau, now a building contractor in Ramona, Calif. “I would assume it was Delaney, because as the radioman, he would go out first to leave room for the gunner to climb down out of the turret and put his chute on.
“There wasn’t room in the turret for the gunner to wear a parachute. As a gunner, my parachute hung on the bulkhead of the plane near Delaney. We set up an escape procedure where he was supposed to hand me my chute and jump, and then I was to follow him. The procedure took a couple of seconds.”
Nadeau added that he “didn’t know what to think” when he heard the plane was shot down.
“I felt bad that Delaney and Mr. White had died,” he said. “I just had the feeling that had I been there, Delaney and I might have both made it out alive — that is, unless one of us got hit by AA. Delaney and I had practiced our escape procedure constantly. He might have stayed to help White get out of the turret and delayed too long. it’s one of those things that never leaves your mind. Why didn’t I go that day?”
Vice-President Bush said that he chose to finish the bombing run rather than bail out early because as a Naval Aviator, he was disciplined to do that.
“We were trained to complete our runs no matter what the obstacle,”he remarked
There is also a fine account of Midway in Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. Hanson’s chapter includes a tribute to the sacrifice of the Lost Squadron.
Bert Earnest, Pilot
“When I told any people I was in Torpedo Squadron Eight, they said you couldn’t have been because they’re all dead.”
Buddy’s Destroyer:
Richard Best commanded Bombing 6, a squadron of Dauntless dive-bombers, on the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
On December 7, 1941, due to an unexpected delay, the carrier was about 150 miles (241 kilometers) off Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On June 4, 1942, he was in a dive-bomber heading for a Japanese carrier force. Planes from those carriers had just bombed Midway.
We set out on the course to take us to a point 175 miles (282 kilometers) northwest of Midway. When we got there at the end of the two-hour period, there was nothing. You could see that Midway was off to our left, because there were tremendous smoke columns coming about 20 miles (32 kilometers) up in the air.
[Lt. Comdr. Clarence] McCluskey [air group commander of the Enterprise] saw a destroyer making very high speed towards the northeast. He figured it had been detached from the main force and was hurrying to get back in position. So he picked up the course and went ahead of it. At that point, my number two man signaled over by dot and dash—using a hand, where a closed fist is a dot, open hand is a dash—that he is out of oxygen. We were at 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) at the time. So I took off my oxygen mask and held it up towards him…
Yuji Akamatsu
[Japanese ships picked up the survivors and sailed for Japan.]
We were taken to Kanoya. The place was a thrown-together building, with two or three layers of barbed wire around it.
We were put into it, there was a guard posted, and from there on we couldn’t leave. It was because up until then battle after battle had been won but then at Midway we suffered a crushing defeat.
This did not jibe with what was being announced officially.
We had seen this with our own eyes, and so we were zipped up by counterintelligence. Until around July, all our meals were brought to us, and we were treated like prisoners.
The sub that was attacked by that IJN destroyer was the USS Nautilus, and Richard H O’Kane was aboard that boat for the battle. They fired their torps and missed, but they caused quite the fright to the Japanese, and the destroyer spent a lot of depth charges trying to sink her.
That destroyer was the IJN Arashi.
Richard O’Kane later went on to be the XO on the Wahoo, and sank a lot of Japanese ships. Later, O’Kane was given command of his own boat, the Tang, where he sank even more.
So many destinies crossed paths at Midway.
The North Vietnamese certainly did shoot at the USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy in 1964. For good measure in 1980 when the Turner Joy did her last deployment before decommissioning the North Vietnamese came out and took a last shot at her for old time’s sake. I was told they took out the stereo in the wardroom.
I was JOOD on the bridge of the USS England, astern of the Turner Joy that night. Yes, they got the stereo.
The shot came from a group of fishing boats off the coast of North Vietnam. The Turner Joy sent a burst of .50 MG fire over the boats. No more shots were fired.
I had almost forgotten that night.
Awesome stories. And to think the Turner Joy is presently moored an hour from my home!
Torpedo 8 was devasted mostly because they were flying the obsolete TBD Devastator aircraft – a very poor performing 1930′s era design.
Midway was the last use of the Devastator, soon replaced by the much more capable TBF Avenger.
The GREATEST GENERATION no doubt.
Another great history lesson from the Belmont Club…thanks folks for all you do!
One little known fact about Torpedo Sqdrn 8 is that the aircraft normally carried 3 men in each aircraft. The radios installed in the TBD aircraft were from the 30’s and were so complex to operate that they carried a radio operator. Later installations abandoned the radios that required the tuning and setting procedures and simply used a set for each frequency to be used, tuned up on the ground.
But the commander of TS 8 knew full well what was likely to happen, chose to leave all of the radio operators on the carrier, and thus cut his men lost by a third. BUT the Wildcat top cover assigned to TS 8 never heard a call for help from TS 8, and cloud cover prevented them from seeing what was going on. The fighters never came down to help and did not engage the enemy in that battle. So the squadron commander’s compassion may have led to the unit’s demise.
In addition to the TBFs of TS 8 that attacked from Midway there were USAAF B-26’s that attacked using torpedoes as well. They go no hits, but one, looking to escape the heaviest fire, flew right down the deck of a Japanese carrier at an altitude of inches. The crews of the B-26’s were not trained in torpedo attack but thought it would be the best weapon to use. If they had put some 500 lb bombs on board instead and slung then through the side of that carrier on that run, TS 8’s sacrifice might not have been required.
VDH’s book points out something about Midway that none of the others do. The torpedo attacks from Midway, the B-17 high level raids, the Vindicator attacks from Midway, and the TBD attacks, all did no damage but added up to overwhelm the Japanese thought process. And the Japanese destroyer spotted by the SBD that finally put them on course for the enemy was separated from the rest of the fleet by the ineffective attacks of the USS Nautilus, which later sunk one of the crippled Japanese carriers.
As Tom Paine said about public money “Not a beggar passes in the streets whose mite is not in that mass.” So it is true in war. Even those who do not score are part of the win.
Finally, for the shocking story of how badly US torpedo development was botched in the 1930’s, I recommend the definitive work, Silent Victory.
George, We may know each other. It is a small world. Please contact me through my Blogger ID.
I grew up reading these kind of stories. Horatio at the bridge, the 300 Spartans. Men who fought and died for what they believed in. Since Viet Nam we have witnesses the growth of an anti-American class that hates this country and sides with its enemies. At the moment it seems that this group has the upper hand. So what happens when society loses the ability to inspire the kind of behavior that makes men willing to sacrifice themselves for their country? Do the barbarians just push open the door and walk in?
how many people here saw the tv program on the battle of midway during the last week. the program had a mix of historical footage and cgi graphics to show how each section of the battle went.
It was my great pleasure to serve in the last crew of the USS Waldron (DD 699). Laid down in 1943, Waldron saw action in the pacific at Okinawa, Korea, and Viet Nam. In 1973 she was sold to the Republic of Columbia and renamed the ARC Santander (DD-03).
After 2 years aboard Waldron, I was part of the “sales team”. The Columbian Navy crew that took possesion were fine, cultured gentlmen and skilled naval officers and crew.
To this day we still have reunions. Sometimes our Columbian friends attend.
The next one is in Baltimore, this fall.
Haze grey and underway.
I venture that B Hussein would consider the naval aviators to be war criminals who were trying to prevent the Japanese from liberating Hawaii from the American racist imperialists. What does he know about how the Japanese treated their Asian subjects?
His mother would have been waving the Japanese flag as the the Japanese battle group entered Pearl Harbor IF they had won.
The actors in the WW2 movies playing Japanese aviators were US Koreans. Koreans hate the Japanese.
@ 33. Lifeofthemind:
We may know each other.
Actually, we all do. Albeit somewhat virtually.
It does not tell how you’d react, but it does tell how you think. If, for some reason, one day, you (most of the posters) come to my house and ask for help, I won’t hesitate for a moment to help as much as I am able.
[Not all at once! LOL!]
@ Kingston53:
I think that they already have.
By the way, around 20 years ago a friend of mine was at an airshow and they were selling copies of a beautiful painting that showed Ensign George Gay’s final run in at Midway. He found out that George Gay was at the same airshow, bought a copy of the painting and had it signed. Priceless!
One of the interesting results of the Battle of Midway was that, after opposing them for many years, the USN got into heavy bombers.
The PBYs the USN used for scouting cruised at about 75 kts, were poorly armed, and were attacked by “every type of Japanese aircraft” to quote the officer in charge of recon for the Navy at Midway.
In contrast, the USAAF B-17’s not only found the enemy fleet but boldly flew right over it and even managed to shoot down a Zero or two. So at first the Navy put their recon experts aboard the B-17’s at Midway and then began to procure B-17’s and, especially, B-24’s for their own use.
Then they took the B-24, added more guns and modified it into the Privateer. A friend of mine was on board when two Privateers were attacked by 12 George fighters off Japan. They took some damage but shot down two of the fighters and made it home with no men killed. One Japanese round hit and jammed the front upper turret. He pulled the round out of the turret gears and has it to this day. And one of the very fighters that made that attack is on display at the museum at Pensacola.
@ 38. twobyfour:
I used to post quite a bit, but with the kids reaching t-ball age, I mostly lurk.
After years of doing both (posting and lurking), I believe wholeheartedly that the vast majority of Belmonteers would say exactly what you did: “If, for some reason, one day, you (most of the posters) come to my house and ask for help, I won’t hesitate for a moment to help as much as I am able.”
It’s who we were before we found each other here, and who we continue to be.
Now, with that covered, might I borrow a cup of anti-stimulus package?
Triton
Every civlization needs its heroes. Homer immortalized the names and deeds of Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Odysseus.
May the valor and deeds of Torpedo 8 be spoken by men 2,000 years from today. The manly virtues of honor, courage and duty sustain a civilization that cannot continue to exist without them.
Salute, my brothers.
re USS Waldron, named for John C. Waldron, commander of Torpedo 8, and he and his men’s knowledge of their odds long before they went into the attack (from the wiki):
“…on the eve of battle, Commander Waldron called his men together and distributed a mimeographed plan of attack. He concluded by saying that if worst came to worst, he wanted each man to do his utmost to destroy the enemy. “If there is only one plane left to make a final run-in,” he told his men, “I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings, and give ‘em hell.”
Just one more comments on this and I will stop, since I am sure y’all are tired of me. Yesterday I saw two Internet items that made me think.
One is that they will have an airshow near here, and as part of it they are auctioning off a ride in a restored B-25 bomber. So a couple of guys will pay hundreds of dollars to take a 50 mile ride in a very noisy and uncomfortable beast. They will do this, and in fact the old bomber still flys, because people are determined to remember and honor those who served in WWII.
Another items is that a French Priest is journeying across the former USSR recording the stories of those Jews who died in the “Holocaust of Bullets.” Those estimated 2 million who were simply shot by the Nazis as they took over new territory and thus never made it as far as a concentration camp. So the priest is also working to remember those who died in WWII.
WWII ended but will never be forgotten if these kinds of people have anything to say about it. But it is well to remember that there are still those in the world who would pay – in a manner similar to the B-25 riders – to journey to the graves of the murdered Jews in order not to honor them but to dance on them. And there are many more who would rather just pretend that it never happened. It ended but it is not over.
“it’s not over” –it’s a category error to wall off nazism & communism as political ideologies –that’s to put the problem far down the road from where it really is –the potential in every human being to fall one way and not rise the other.
When I read about the Battle of Midway in Herman Wouk’s War And Remembrance, I was surprised and chagrined that I had never heard about it before. Eventually I realized that was a symptom.
The lives of these people should be taught in school. I don’t think my kids have any heroes at all that aren’t defined by the current pop culture. In fact I don’t think my kids have any heroes at all.
I just asked my 23-year old son some questions. He heard the name Nathan Hale in the movie Harold and Maude but doesn’t know what he did, he thinks the Alamo had something to do with some war with Mexico, and he heard about Midway from me. I don’t have a heart to ask him about something really obscure like Valley Forge or Bunker Hill.
Thanks to Mr. Fernandez and everyone else here for making this blog one of the best learning experiences on the net.
RWE – I’m teaching “Judgment at Nuremberg” in my film class on Tuesday. I can probably guarantee you that none or, at most, one of my students (college undergrads) have seen it.
I have spent all weekend working on the lesson plan … have twice as many discussion questions as usual. A dense (in a good way, at least IMO) film! Lots and lots of history. What I didn’t realize before until doing my research this time around was that Abby Mann borrowed almost all of Col. Lawson’s (Richard Widmark’s) opening statement, and a substantial portion of Herr Rolfe’s (Maximilian Schell’s) from the opening statement of BG Telford Taylor at the actual Judges’ Trial.
Reminded once again as I watch … Richard Widmark had a remarkable speaking voice. He has to be one of my favorite character actors from that era.
telling that USN’s rendezvous point to await the oncoming enemy fleet was named “Point Luck”. Not sure but i think Yorktown and Hornet and Enterprise were all we had in June 1942, and two of ‘em were sent to Point Luck. In other times, in other places, a similar set of strategic and tactical conditions would’ve pulled Yorktown and Hornet back to Pearl –or maybe San Francisco, rather than “Point Luck”.
41. Triton’sPolarTiger: Conversely, I’ve lurked here for a long time but have only started commenting recently. I remember you. Nice to see you.
42. Peter Boston: Torpedo 8 was very much like the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. They deserve to be remembered and honored, even 2000 years from now.
Buddy:
Have you heard of the Harry Turtledove series that has an alternate history version of the attack on Pearl Harbor? That is just what happens. The Japanese invade and capture Hawaii and the equivalent of the battle of Midway takes place “midway” between Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast. And the U.S. loses that battle, big time.
So the U.S. does not return to retake Hawaii until 1943. And by that time the Japanese have 3 carriers to defend with and the USN has a few more than they had before – 17 big flattops and jeep carriers – and equipped with Hellcats instead of Wildcats.
A previous colleague of mine was a young ensign who was assigned to the rock on Pearl at the start of the war to work for Nimitz. He told us at lunch one day that they did not know where Halsey’s carrier was. He said that Spruence had a nervous breakdown before Midway. He said that a lot of the officers were drunks but Jim is a bit of prude that way. But I know from reading that the prewar Navy had a lot of officers who were not pyschologically prepared for war. For them Pearl was a pleasant resort.
Another colleague, a genius of sorts, said that the Japanese should have led with their battleships, whose guns outgunned our battleships and who targeting and gunnery was better than ours. If they had not attacked Pearl but instead let us give battle in in the Philipine Sea they would have defeated out battle group.
Our subs were designed to have long legs to keep up with the battle groups. Same for the Japanese. The German subs were initially designed for coastal action.
The Japanese had a superior torpedo, the Long Lance that ran on liquid oxygen. The US Naval torpedo “experts” decided that that fuel was too dangerous.
We only learned about that torpedo after the war.
jay, i dunno but it sounds like ayour friend has scrambled some eggs. The famous “Where is Halsey?” is from an event in the Battle of Leyte Gulf (Halsey was feinted out of position, chasing what proved later to have been a diversion that was still nevertheless an enemy combat unit. Spruance is getting mixed up, I think, with the unfortunate Admiral Gormley, of the fleet supporting the landings on Guadalcanal, a man whose caution (and reported deep depression and outbreak of boils and other stress sysmptoms) had led him to retire from the Guadacanal waters, leaving Marines and Army already in a furious fight for survival unsupported by not just supplies but naval gunfire, for a time. Halsey was Gormley’s replacement.
RWE, have heard great stuff about Harry Turtledove and great alt.hist –look forward to reading it someday. some good alt.hist at John Reilly’s site –including some long very dense stuff –not ‘scan’ mtrl i mean.
Buddy, My colleague was a junior office in the Rock with close access to Nimitz. He is a famous economist whose memory at 90 is still sharp. Our discussions were in 1973-74.
Jim’s main job was to proved the worse ships of the Pacific Fleet to MacArthur. In 1945 he cut the order for the Indianapolis to sail for Tinian not knowing what the Indy was going to carry. On the way back the Indy was sunk by a Long Lance. The skipper had conflicting sailing orders and was not zigzagging.
Your response reminded my of a lunch we had at VT with another colleague who had read a lot about WW2 and served in Europe. When Gordon contradicted him Jim said “Gordon I was there”. He was in the command post in the Rock all through Midway.
I may have gotten the battle wrong about Spruence but I doubt. I have know a number of combats vets in our Navy, Marines and AF as well as Israelies. The mental strain is enormous especially for commanders.
Nimitz believed that we would lose the battle, Jim said.
The book I recommended, Silent Victory, describes how some of the Navy’s top sub commanders in peacetime could not hack it in wartime. All spit and polish and being careful not to ding the boat may get you promoted in peacetime, but in wartiue they would rather you bring back a grubby, shot up sub that kicked some serious butt than a clean one that avoided all contact with the enemy.
Adm Lockwood, one of the Navy’s senior sub officers in the Pacific was in charge of torpedo development before the war and KNEW the failures of the torps to work was due to incompetence on the part of the sub skippers. Finally, after some skippers who obviously knew what they were doing came in with detailed records of torp failure on the order of 90% plus they started thinking that maybe something was wrong.
I gave my copy of Silent Victory to a friend who develops rockets for the Navy, telling him it should be required reading for everyone in weapons development as an example of how NOT to do it.
By the way, George Gay’s torp hit the carrier he was aiming at. It failed to explode and was used as a lifeboat by some of Japanese who abandoned the carrier after the Dauntless’s had finished.
A brief outline of the battle and the eyewitness account of Japanese pilot, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who was lead pilot at Pearl Harbor.
Five Minutes That Changed The War
The Japanese were now caught in a logistical nightmare. Wanting to follow up on their earlier attack on Midway, they armed their bombers with bombs. However, in the midst of battle, scouts spotted the American Fleet, so the bombers were ordered refitted with torpedoes. Simultaneously, the Zeros defending the Fleet returned to their carriers for rearming and refueling. At this moment, more American attackers appeared, Commander Fuchida continues his story:
“Preparations for a counter-strike against the enemy had continued on board our four carriers throughout the enemy torpedo attacks. One after another, planes were hoisted from the hangar and quickly arranged on the flight deck. There was no time to lose. At 1020 Admiral Nagumo gave the order to launch when ready. On Akagi’s flight deck all planes were in position with engines warming up. The big ship began turning into the wind. Within five minutes all her planes would be launched.
Five minutes! Who would have dreamed that the tide of battle would shift completely in that brief interval of time?
—
Consequently, it may be said that the American dive-bombers’ success was made possible by the earlier martyrdom of their torpedo planes. Also, our carriers had no time to evade because clouds hid the enemy’s approach until he dove down to the attack.
We had been caught flatfooted in the most vulnerable condition possible – decks loaded with planes armed and fueled for attack.
Looking about, I was horrified at the destruction that had been wrought in a matter of seconds. There was a huge hole in the flight deck just behind the amidship elevator. The elevator itself, twisted like molten glass, was drooping into the hangar. Deck plates reeled upward in grotesque configurations. Planes stood tail up, belching livid flame and jet-black smoke.
Reluctant tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched the fires spread, and I was terrified at the prospect of induced explosions which would surely doom the ship.“
my understanding of submarine boat commaders just before and just after the beginning of WWII was that their average age went from the mid 30′s or so to the low 20′s.
The younger men could handle the stress.
“I thought being rescued by the submarine was the end of my problem,”Bush said. “I didn’t realize that I would have to spend the duration of the sub’s 30 remaining days on board.”
The following day, Finback retrieved Lieutenant Junior Grade James Beckman, a fighter pilot on USS Enterprise who was shot down over HaHa Jima.
“We put Bush and the other four men to work as lookouts,” Spratlin said. “Four hours on, eight hours off.”
As lookouts, they helped make sure that enemy planes and submarines didn’t sneak up on Finback during daylight or at night. The submarine did much of its patrolling on the surface in the daytime and always at night because that was when Finback recharged its batteries.
“Bush and the other aviators really got into the submarine experience,” Spratlin remarked. “Every time an enemy plane would force us down, they’d curse it just like we did.”
Bush said that the most beautiful time for standing watch was between 2400 and 0400. “I’ll never forget the beauty of the Pacific — the flying fish, the stark wonder of the sea, the waves breaking across the bow,” he remarked.
The 30 days aboard Finback weren’t all beautiful, however. Some of the more dramatic moments included being depth charged and bombed by enemy ships and planes.
“I thought I was scared at times flying into combat, but in a submarine you couldn’t do anything, except sit there,” he said. ”The submariners were saying that it must be scary to be shot at by antiaircraft fire and I was saying to myself, ‘Listen brother, it is not really as bad as what you go through. The tension, adrenaline and the fear factor were about the same (getting shot at by antiaircraft fire as opposed to being depthcharged). When we were getting depth charged, the submariners did not seem overly concerned, but the other pilots and I didn’t like it a bit. There was a certain helpless feeling when the depth charges went off that I didn’t experience when flying my plane against AA.”
Besides being bombed and depth-charged, Bush was aboard when Finback sank two enemy freighters which were trying to get supplies into Iwo Jima a few months before U.S. forces invaded it. By war’s end, Finback had received 13 battle stars and had sunk 59,383 tons of enemy shipping.
“It was obvious to me that Bush would be a very successful guy in whatever he decided to do,” said Tom Keene, now a retired architect living in Elkhart, Ind. “He was always saying something to make us laugh. He kept up our morale.”
man alive –such sacrifices to put the torps on target and then –nothing. One wonders if and how many others from the slaughter of torpedo bombers that day struck and dudded.
Jay, i didn’t mean to go armchair contentious –it’s just that Spruance was “mr. cool” by all accounts, and went on after Midway to great victories at the Battle of the Phillipine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A nervous breakdown before Midway you’d think would’ve gotten him reassigned posthaste –but what do i know. Also, that Nimitz believed he would lose the battle, you must mean that he believed he could not prevent an occupation of Midway, as he surely wouldn’t have risked carriers if he thought he would lose them for naught. but again, what do i know –i just read the material. I’m sure there’s warts on the giants –there always are.
Charles, That is true. I read sub skipper logs in 1979 as we prepared to model and simulate subs attacking battle groups. The torpedos used then were straight runners. The fire control solution problem for firing while submerged was nearly impossible. So those young (very) skippers attacked on the surface.
But as is explained in Silent Victory our torpedos had several types of flaws including faltey trigger mechanisms. The torpedos bounced off the target ships and Newport refused to admit there was a problem.
One main reason for the problems was there was not enough funds in the 30′s to do live testing. When I worked on torpedo countermeausers in 1979 we also did not have enough funds for real live testing. We used special torpedos that would float to the surface to be used again.
Some of the tests had the torpedos breaching. DC said that could not happen.
Can you imagine was we will face with the coming cuts and the DC corruption??
Cuts and corruption?
Smart Power costs nothing except the effort of selfless public servants like BHO and HRC.
Be thankful our tax dollars are now being spent more wisely.
We’ll be fine.
#44- October of 1985 (I think) I drove from Beaumont down to Harlingen for the Confederate (now Commemmerative) Air Force show to meet some friends flying in from Philly for the air show. While wandering around the exhibets/vendors area, we were approached by a fellow looking for paying riders for a B-17 ride. About 15-20 of us paid $50 each gas money/renovation contribution to lay down in the belly of the plane for a 30 minute low-speed, low-level ride circling the airport, the plane slipping and sliding around so bad we were all nauseated by the aircraft’s motion. What a thrill!
Film Clips from the Past
U-boat Attack, 1917 Captured German footage of one of its submarines in action during World War I.
The Japanese Launch Their Attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941 Japanese aircraft take off from their carriers.
The Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor, 1941 The view from the Japanese cockpit as they attack.
—
also
The Bataan Death March, 1942
I don;t think it was mainly that the young men could better handle the stress. I think it was that the young men had much less to unlearn than those with all that peacetime bureaucrat experience.
Of course, I am basing that on my Pentagon experience rather than any sub commander time (unless you count some hundreds of hours playing Silent Service).
re: Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the war effort.
Andrew Breitbart reported that a big name Hollywood Producer approached the Pentagon immediately after 9-11 and offered his services, saying he was the best in his field and wanted to contribute.
“We don’t do Propaganda”
was the response he received.
“Well then, we’re gonna lose!”
he replied.
From a quick search on the web, using “Task Force 58, Spruance”:
“The Fast Carrier Task Force” came into being in late 1943, after the arrival in the Central Pacific of the first ships of the Essex and Independence classes. This force was the Pacific War’s equivalent of the great gunship battlefleets of earlier conflicts. By the time of the Battle for Leyte Gulf it had already proved itself to be one of the most potent instruments in the history of naval warfare; obliterating Japanese air power, and sweeping enemy warships and merchant shipping from the seas, wherever it had ventured.
It was divided into carrier task groups, each group containing typically between three and five carriers, and with each group having its own strong escort, a large number of cruisers and destroyers, and often two or more of the new fast battleships.
From early 1944 the Fast Carrier Force was known as ‘Task Force 58′ when serving under Admiral Spruance’s Fifth Fleet, and as ‘Task Force 38′ as part of Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet. (Third and Fifth Fleets in general consisted of the same vessels, only their command teams differed).
*****************************************
From a website devoted to the history of the USS Essex (lead ship of the Essex class).
As I remember, Spruance was in command at Midway because Halsey came down with some kind of itching hives.
Jay, with all due respect to your veteran friend, I think he’s gotten a few things messed up in his memory. Not saying he is forgetful or not sharp, just gotten a few things mixed up. I’m sure he is a tremendous guy. I once knew a whole bunch of WWII vets of all kinds (one retired as a two-star general in the Air Force, and flew P-38′s in North Africa; he’s now long dead), and they sometimes got things out of sequence in re-telling their stories. That doesn’t lessen my regard for any of them at all. But now they are almost all gone, including my Dad, who was a veteran of the Pacific War
Shivermetimbers said:
“I like the argument made by one of the characters in Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (the German General commenting on the war), that The Battle Midway won the war True, the Russians may have bore the brunt of the battles against the Germans, but after the Battle of Midway, Japan’s defeat was just a matter of time and permitted Roosevelt to concentrate efforts on defeating Germany.”
The opinion that “the Battle Midway won the war” is not correct.
The Battle of Midway was the turning point of the Pacific War and a great victory for the United States. However the Pacific War was a mere side show to the main war fought in Europe against the Nazis. The real “beginning of the end” was when the Nazis failed to conquer Moscow. The Nazis should have negotiated for peace after they lost the Battle of Stalingrad (von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler was justifiable on both moral and strategic grounds). All doubt about Germany’s defeat ended after the Nazis lost the battle of Kursk.
While it is true that America provided most of the war material for WW-II and distinguished itself in both France and the Pacific, it is also true that the Russians did most of the heavy lifting.
@Doug,
Link please
Andrew mentioned it on the Dennis Miller Show while discussing his new “Big Hollywood” site.
Dennis tried to get him to reveal the name, he replied that he is very well known and currently has a big movie with a “very dark” theme
Knowing nothing about contemporary films, that didn’t help me, but no doubt will some others, esp Dennis, who is a complete movie freak.
(he’s on an upcoming Turner Classic feature)
Walt,
“Had the Japanese won the Battle of Midway, the war would have taken longer, but would never have been in doubt.”
Disagree. If the Japanese win at Midway, they also hold Guadalcanal, which gives them an airbase that threatens the resupply line to Australia. They conquer New Guinea, and (at a minimum) neutralize Australia. Much better access to raw materials. If the Japanese win at Midway, the outcome is very much in doubt.
Nothing against the great Red Army, but it had little choice but to do that heavy lifting. When its leadership DID have a choice, it made a deal with Hitler and immediately took all of Finland (after the Finns bloodied ‘em far out of proportion to their size) and half of already-defeated Poland in a walk-in, after which that part of the Polish office corp in the russian zone, numbering 7 to 14 thousand, were “disappeared”, to be found later by the Germans (after the war between the two had begun and the Red Army had vacated easter Poland) in shallow graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, each with a small caliber bullet wound in the back of the neck, in the favored NKVD (Red military/political police) fashion.
USA, by contrast, DID have a choice in the fight against Hitler, and not only didn’t team up with him a la Stalin, didn’t even stay out of his way, but went freely to Europe to fight him. While fighting Japan, too, of course.
That German general in War and Remembrance, Armin von Roon, was a great literary device; Wouk led his chapters (can’t recall if some or all) with short, boldface “excerpts” from “Von Roon’s book” (a “postwar autobiography” which one of the characters, i believe protaganist’s 20 something student son, was ‘translating’ as part of a job or school) as a way of telling dry history facts within a novel about an American family, a naval family with several war-affected members scattered around the globe, all of whom were ongoing threads within the book.
What made the “Von Roon” excerpts so interesting is that Wouk wrote them as von Roon in first person, relating a Prussian military professional’s point of view, with much commentary (novelized but reflecting actual memes) on the various enemy militaries he had faced.
I remember he referred to Roosevelt as a “ruthless, spidery genius”, which shocked me a bit, reading it in the late 70s, as who would’ve thought our god-president was anything except completely innocent and straightforward at all times, even to our enemies? And i was already in my early 30s –and still the magic held, i remember thinking, ‘well, von Roon would of course be paranoid, would of course see designs in FDR’s innocent ‘onward christian soldier’ fighting of the war’. it took more decades before the notion of FDR being a hard-boiled pol ever broke thru the fog.
With regards to Eggplant, and all:
A very good single volume history of the War in the East between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is “Barbarossa” by Alan Clarke. There are a lot of other good books on the subject, of course, such as “Panzer Leader” by Guderian (I think?) and “Panzer Battles” by von Mellenthin.
The one continuing truth to that part of the war was the almost superhuman courage and tenacity of the Russian soldier. Reviled as “untermensch” by the Wehrmacht (and that’s what my uncle thought too, who served in US 3rd Army, under Patton), after a few years of fighting, some Germans began to think of them as “ubermensch”. They were, at times, so poorly led and large units stupidly used in poor tactical and strategic ways, that there was huge loss of life in the Soviet Army just due to ridiculous decisions at the highest levels, pushing masses of men into frontal attacks, and the like. Which only makes the average soldiers’ morale that much more surprising. I think a Western Army would have mutinied under some of the incredible blunders by some Soviet Generals.
The failure in 1941 for the Wehrmacht to reach Moscow and encircle it is more due to the failure of the field generals to operate cohesively and recognize early enough the importance of Moscow as an objective, than the usual blame on Hitler for over-reaching, military interference as the Fuhrer. At the same time, the 900 day siege of Leningrad had begun.
And the greater disaster for the Wehrmacht(which ultimately led to their defeat, IMHO) was allowing the German Army to get bogged down in street fighting at Stalingrad, instead of by-passing and encircling the city in a mechanized siege operation; and that was due to the Fuhrer’s desire to conquer and reduce the city. The German 6th Army was ground down and wasted in the failed attempt to subdue the whole city. And that, I think, LOST the war for the Germans because they lost the momentum of movement in battle. Once the battle became “static” street-to street fighting, the advantage went to the Soviets, as they had more men to spend in such a war of attrition.
The success of Zhukov in particular was because he understood the limitations under which he commanded, both above and below him. His victory at Stalingrad (the whole campaign, not just the winter encirclement), speaks of a high level of generalship, even though the losses in that one “battle” that stretched out for months might have been close to 1 million men. Hard to understand from our Western perspective.
Being a true Hero of the Soviet Union did not protect Zhukov from ultimate denouncement from the Party some years after the war.
As it is historically said,”All glory is fleeting.”
to E. nigma’s great capsule, might come back ’round to Midway; has Hitler won Stalingrad, the way to the Caucasus and oil was open; to lose Stalingrad could very well have been the end for Stalin and Russia’s war.
As it was, for a time, in late ’42, the 6 month long battle (ending in very early ’43) was almost in German hands (indeed at one point Hitler calle ‘victory’). The Red army was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. What made the difference was the arrival of Siberian troops from the far east, arriving by rail and feeding straight across the Volga into the firing line.
Why were these Siberian divisions so late to arrive? They had been held for defense against Japan, just in case Japan gained a quick win (or a truce) against the anglo navies, and turned to help ally Hitler. What had allowed Stalin to finally train these units west to Stalingrad? The Battle of Midway.
buddy larsen said:
“When its leadership DID have a choice, it made a deal with Hitler and immediately took all of Finland (after the Finns bloodied ‘em far out of proportion to their size) and half of already-defeated Poland in a walk-in, after which that part of the Polish office corp in the russian zone, numbering 7 to 14 thousand, were “disappeared”, to be found later by the Germans (after the war between the two had begun and the Red Army had vacated easter Poland) in shallow graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, each with a small caliber bullet wound in the back of the neck, in the favored NKVD (Red military/political police) fashion.”
There is no argument that Joseph Stalin was a monster and the Soviet political system was evil. Whether or not Stalin was more evil than Hitler is difficult to say. Stalin murdered more people but Hitler’s Holocaust was incredibly stupid and dehumanizing. Stalin’s worst crime against the Russian people was killing off most of the Soviet general staff just prior to WW-II. One of the reasons why the Finns performed so well against the Soviets was due to the Soviet soldiers being commanded by Soviet political officers rather than career military men.
buddy larsen also said:
“USA, by contrast, DID have a choice in the fight against Hitler, and not only didn’t team up with him a la Stalin, didn’t even stay out of his way, but went freely to Europe to fight him. While fighting Japan, too, of course.”
Germany declared war against the United States as required under the Tripartite Pact (the United States had previously declared war against Japan in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor). Roosevelt quite correctly wanted to go to war against the Nazis but needed an excuse to overcome lingering isolationist objections. Initially after the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was some concern both in the United States and in England that the US would focus only on the Japanese. Fortunately, Hitler in another of his stupid decisions, declared war against the US and solved Roosevelt’s dilemma.
buddy larsen also made the insightful comment:
“The Red army was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. What made the difference was the arrival of Siberian troops from the far east, arriving by rail and feeding straight across the Volga into the firing line. Why were these Siberian divisions so late to arrive? They had been held for defense against Japan..”
Russia had been badly defeated by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese war and was invaded by Japan during the Russian revolution (my ancestors witnessed the Japanese landing in Vladivostok). Consequently, Russia regarded Japan as a serious danger. Strictly speaking, Hitler was not obligated to come to Japan’s defense under the Tripartite Pact because Japan had initiated war against the United States (Japan had played a dirty trick on Germany when they attacked Pearl Harbor). However Hitler believed the Soviet Siberian divisions were more likely to remain in Siberia if he declared war against the United States. This was an unwise decision since the threat represented by the Wehrmacht was an “actual” while the threat of the Imperial Japanese Army was a “hypothetical”. Stalin made the correct strategic decision to move those troops to support Stalingrad and thus prevent the conquest of the vitally important oil fields south of the Caucasus Mountains.
As an aside, it’s interesting how much of the strategic thinking in WW-II revolved around maintaining and acquiring control over petroleum supplies. I’m fairly certain that we are in the front end of a global economic depression and this will eventually lead to a world war. Just as was true of WW-II, this next world war will revolve around control of the world’s petroleum supplies. If Obama has any appreciation for history he should focus his economic recovery efforts towards construction of a non-petroleum based economy, e.g. nuclear power and synthetic petroleum based upon coal. For stupid ideological reasons, Obama won’t do this and we’ll be poorly situated when this next world war begins. I’m convinced that McCain’s election defeat by Obama was a branch point in history (very bad for us, unfortunately).
One positive surprise so far:
I expected the Dems to once again propose drawing down the strategic reserve
(“in these troubled and unprecedented economic times“)
after W spent 7 years replenishing it.
This following Clinton’s using it as a budget balancer.
If oil was still $140, they no doubt would have, seemingly having no appreciation whatsoever for it’s intended purpose.
Why was Chester Nimitz so willing to give battle at Midway? Odds were against his achieving a victory.
Well, same reason Merrill’s Marauders and Ord’s Chindits were doing their seemingly Quixotic thing.
The whole goal in the Pacific at that time was to prevent a German-Japanese linkup in the Indian Ocean. Had that nightmare come to pass, both Axis powers would have had much better access to raw materials, the Japanese would have necessarily become more coherent in their efforts, and Germany would have had
a solid door at its back. Last, but far from least: Linking the two forces together would have meant that Tojo and Hitler would no longer have been in charge. De Facto, the axis would have been run by Yammamoto and Rommell. And those two were about half smart.
Paul Johnson concluded that had the linkup occured, the war would have gone on into the 1950s and been settled with sidespread use of atomic bombs.
In short, just getting the Japanese Fleet to where it could be properly engaged and distracted was worth the risk of losing the battle. And next? I hear tell that The Good Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves.
That might have been what happened.
Your comment reminded me of an author Ingraham had on who wrote
“Survivors Club”
On the first page I read, (Page 13) I learned Steve Irwin was likely not killed by the stinger, nor the venom, but by his own actions!
Be prepared, be smart, be brave, have faith, be lucky!
Dave:
I was about to say that some experts have concldued that it was the German defeat in the Middle East that assured victory. I even wrote a magazine article myself that mentioned this. Allied victory in North Africa prevented a link up through India with the Japanese, and also would have secured oil supplies for the Axis and access to other raw materials. For example, the Germans wever never able to build enough of the much vaunted Me-262 jets to do more than put on a good airshow because they did not have access to supplies of nickel. Turkey had nickle and more could have been obtained from the far east. As it was, Iraq revolted against the British and the Japanese actually did invade India.
The British were able to treat India as a backwater until they all but had the war won in Europe, sending airplanes and tanks there as first line defense that no one else wanted, because they had stopped the Germans in North Africa.
But as we have said before, everyone’s “mite is in that mass.” A Japanese invasion of India was crippled by the lack of carriers they lost at Midway. And Japan was more tied up than they should have been in China because of U.S. aid to Chang. The USAAF development of heavy bombers led to both the defeat of the U-boats and the destruction of the Luftwaffe. And so on and so on.
And as for the USSR, they STARTED WWII, in league with the Nazis.
Just as an end note, most of the lend lease that came to Soviet Russia came through….. (wait for it)…, Basra (where’s that?), then in convoys through Iran and into the Caucausus. If that area (the Caucausus) had fallen to Nazi Germany (and they did hold it briefly in the fall/winter of 1942), the road into Russia would have been closed. Again, a victory there for the Germans would have allowed them to link up with the Afrika Corp and closed the Suez to the Royal Navy.
Jay and Dave make interesting points re Nimitz’ mindset –could have been ‘expecting defeat’ in the way the sheriff in “High Noon” was as the film made clear pretty sure he was a goner, and even had ample justification to quit the fight, in Grace Kelly his new wife wanting him to leave town with her while there was still time, as well as in the townsfolk frozen into helpless passivity by the clock ticking away toward the arrival of the killer. But he stayed and fought because he just could not do otherwise, he himself didn’t understand why.
re Eggplant’s ‘Hitler declared on USA so we had no choice’, true but long before his declaration we did have a choice; ‘arsenal of democracy’, lend lease and USN escorts of convoys triggered the declaration–not to mention of course the surprise (to hitler, too as you say) attack on Pearl by the other hub of the axis. but still, with zero prospect of German boots on USA soil, our effort in Europe was morally different than USSR’s. we could’ve opted for a vastly cheaper (in blood & treasure) sitzkrieg indefinitely. And a long year and a half before Normandy, 8th AAF was locked into that incredibly fierce and bloody air offensive over the continent. It does not seem possible to’ve so quickly come across the vast Atlantic to put 1000 four-engine bombers and 1000 fighter escorts in the air over Germany almost daily but that’s what happened. That was ‘heavy lifting’ that wore down Germany’s war-making power at least arguably as much as the Red Army’s chewing up German divisions on the eastern front, but since it involved boots in the air and not on the ground it is often shorted in memory. I think 8th AAF alone had 80,000 highly trained airmen KIA, and many more POWs (my dad among those, having had his B-17E shot down on the last day of Big Week in February 1944).
re Eggplant’s ruminations on the conditions of another world war, i agree, and it’s making me sick to my stomach to see cheap and stupid pols consign the heart of the “soon to be world-warred over” back to crazy street, throwing away a brilliant world-war spoiling ‘small war’ that could’ve parlayed a peace while petroleum use was transmogrified (just as a small European war in the late 1930s could’ve parlayed a peace while totalitarianism was transmogrified, for a cost of possibly sixty thousand deaths instead of sixty million, and for a few cities busted rather than a few continents).
i think modern Democrats are too stupid to survive in nature, they do it as parasites behind a shield, and are now crippling the shield-bearer even as the coming enemy arms with alacrity, intending this time to prevail.
@68
I meant turning point. But, it was late, and the wife was coming down so I had to hit send before rereading fully. She hates when I read blogs
I did not have time to dig up the book to search for the character’s name – Armin von Roon’s (Thanks Buddy Larson). But, his point (via Heman Wouk) was that the US was so focused on beating Japan; however, Roosevelt knew that the main enemy was Germany. The Battle of Midway was the death knell for Japan, and allowed Roosevelt to concentrate on Europe.
As far as Von Roon’s view that Roosevelt was a spidery genius as Buddy points out, it was how we used the USSR to soften up Germany before we really got involved.
Dave @ 77: I hear tell that The Good Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves
Well, whoever named USN’s high seas assembly rendezvous “Point Luck” must surely have had something like that thought in mind.
Putin is Stalin’s strategic inferior or at least he is overplaying a weaker deck. The reason that the Soviets were able to move their divisions West in time was the Japanese had rejected the “Strike North” option in favor of a “Strike South” towards the Indonesian oilfields. That entailed going through the Philippines which meant going through Douglas MacArthur which meant war with America which meant attacking the fleet at Pearl harbor. The reason that the Japanese rejected the opportunity to invade Siberia was that they had gotten their noses bloodied by Zhukhov at Khalkin Gol, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khalkhin_Gol. The battle ended the day before Hitler invaded Poland.
Today the Chinese occupy the same positions relative to the Russians that the Japanese did 70 years ago. They are also hungry for energy and other resources. The Russians are relatively much weaker to today’s Eastern Power than they were. Putin is a fool for destabilizing the West. His enemy is not before him but behind him. He should be building strong links with and encouraging strong militaries in the democracies he will need when what is now his front, against the harmless democracies of Nato, becomes his back and the Chinese decide to kick in what is now his back door.
It is interesting to read your take on the Tonkin Gulf incident.
I was also “there” that night in August, 1964. While the Maddox and Turner Joy were in the thick of it, there was another destroyer on station, the USS Fetchler (DD-870) was patrolling about 70 miles east, just south of Hainan Island. Upon hearing the radio chatter between Maddox and Turner Joy we reversed course and made flank speed, arriving 2 hours late for the party. I’ve always been a tad miffed when I read the revised history of that night.
I had the great pleasure and honor to serve under Rear Adm. John H. Maurer, ComSub Pac 1966-1968, later Vice Adm. at Chief of Staff. Adm. Maurer was a sub commander during WWII in the Pacific and had some great stories to share with us young pups. Ahhh, those were the days…
BTW, last I heard, he was still kicking and living in Florida. He did not make the trip to our last reunion. The world will be a poorer place when the last of these great warriors pass from this veil of tears.
If Obama has any appreciation for history he should focus his economic recovery efforts towards construction of a non-petroleum based economy, e.g. nuclear power and synthetic petroleum based upon coal. For stupid ideological reasons, Obama won’t do this and we’ll be poorly situated when this next world war begins. – eggplant
This is petty so kip as required.
Gov Schweitzer of MT (where coal deposits are low sulfur and close to surface meaning the safety issues of mining do not pertain) says it’s easy to find investors for the second plant but building the first is impossible (in spite of the three functional plants in South Africa and in spite of the plant in progress by the Chinese). Every single time I raise the coal-to-liquid issue I am slapped down by this that and the other. It seems to me that the idea of war is the tipping point in the argument.
One more time for the record: the ability of the US to mobilize and produce war materiel after Pearl Harbor was a direct function of the vast hydropower facilities installed on the western rivers by Corps and Bureau during the first half of the last century. [ref Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner] It’s the energy.
And I’m sure Michael Ramsbottom of Rentech could build a commercial-scaled coal-to-liquid plant, or two, or three, with a couple billion from the proposed “stimulus” bill.
But no, that’s too practical. It might actually produce something and we don’t want that.
By the way, I started reading a book the other day entitled Luftwaffe Over America. It starts by describing German plans for an attack on the USA. And those plans started around 1900. Even well before the Nazis, to the Germans the USA represented a simply too rich, too unpopulated, and too militarily weak target to leave alone.
“It’s the energy,” says slade of a nation’s war-fighting power. Wonder when will voters see that the invisible hand behind our inability to build nuke, coal, oil, anything at all besides solar and wind if it’s nimby, is a faction residing in the American academy that has never yet uttered one popcorn fart of criticism about Russia or China’s energy choices?
LotM: Unless Putin and the Chinese make common cause and assent to regional hegemony, with the idea that they can postpone a conflict long enough. A Delayed Last Man Standing? Should the West go down there is no global market, it is just grabbing resources and recreating regional markets. Or the Putin may not have a choice–i really doubt if he is that gullible. et Russia deal with Europe, China with Japan and Taiwan, let the ME fail around for a while as see what comes down the road.
In a Truce of Convenience, the real area of contention is Central Asia, and my implication India, the countries in Central Asia south of the ‘stansa nd all that goes with it. Eastern Russia can be put on hold for a bit, Japan and Taiwan being still problematic for the moment. They would have to work something out in Central Asia. Maybe their cooperation in Iran is a clue?
The big unknowns are Israel, Pakistan, Iran and India.
Buudy they will ot see that until the culprits have been grabbed by the perfumed necks and dragged before the American people.
(Funny about the gass price bulge around November, eh? Prices seem reasonable now.)
The first “suicide” planes in the Pacific Theater were those Amercian torpedo planes at Midway. The Kamikazes didn’t come until later.
America’s most virulent enemies today believe they have an advantage because they “value death” whereas we “value life.” They fail to understand that life-valuers will die when necessary.
The daeth-valuers lost in the Pacific, and they lost in Iraq.
OT: Video: Jim Cramer Compares Obama To Lenin
Understand with the democrats in power we’re on central McCarthy time. In this time the US is cast as hopeless Stalinists and the US is the moral equivalent of the Soviet Union. Therefor symmetry/moral equivalence calls for the US to be broken up like the soviet union.
Oh, Cramer looks like Lenin. He even jokes about it on his show from time to time. So for guys who like Cramer–its helpful to know that he’s just had a vision.
RR, i think it’s in the Waldron wiki, he left his radio operators on the deck, presumably to save them unnecessary risk (and no doubt the weight) –but later, on the approach to the run in, radiomen may have been able to summon their missing but nearby Wildcat escort. A mistake by Waldron insofar as his birds were left naked, but had the Wildcats gotten into a fur ball with the Zeros high up, the battle-winning Dauntless dives would perhaps have not happened in the way they did. And then then Waldron’s final message to his squadron, closing the preflight briefing:
“If there is only one plane left to make a final run-in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings, and give ‘em hell.”
*****************
LotM #84 & Mongoose #90 …read the darkest take, below this is hell, above it everything is much much nicer.
“”"”"”"The reason that the Japanese rejected the opportunity to invade Siberia was that they had gotten their noses bloodied by Zhukhov at Khalkin Gol, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khalkhin_Gol. The battle ended the day before Hitler invaded Poland.”"”"”"”"
The Japanese and the then newly-victorious Bolsheviks fought a bitter two-year war in the early 20′s for Eastern Siberia. After the American and Japanese forces completed their “peacekeeeping” mission in the region during the Russian Civil War that followed the Bolshevik takeover of the revolution, the Japanese opted to stay in Eastern Siberia with their substantial forces. They had a different agenda than the Americans to begin with.
As migh be guessed, the Soviets won that war.
If there is a scandal, it is the defeat of the Air Force plans to develope a coal-to-liquids capability to fuel its planes. The plan was stopped purely on the basis of “Global Warming.”
Think of it. The time is probably not ripe to power the civilian economy with coal-to-liquids, for both cost and environmental reasons. But we are talking about the Air Force here.
The coal-to-liquids fuel would be an expensive boondogle, but compared to the megabucks spent on various combat aircraft megaprograms, it would be a proverbial drop-in-a-bucket. But what the coal-to-liquids fuel would provide is far more deterrence than the most Buck Rogers combat aircraft. It would mean the ability to project air power — bombers, tactical aircraft, their logistic tail of cargo transports and tankers — with a domestic source of energy in the event of an international crisis cutting off oil imports. We civilians would contribute to the war effort by shivering in the dark, but the planes would still fly we and we still fight back.
Of course the Air Force coal-to-liquids, too expensive for civilian use but justified by the military use, would be the ultimate in “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logisitcs.” But it may eventually lead to breakthroughs in civilian use of coal-to-liquids, heavy oil, or even switchgrass or other biomass.
But then we had that beyond stupid Representative Henry Waxman requiring any such thing to be carbon neutral. Way to go Hank — if some future conflict has our back to the war and we “go nuclear” as a consequence, are you going to carry this on you conscience?
Waxman ain’t stupid –somebody upthread referred to obama’s green roadblock on nukes as stupid –these things is SMART if your objective is not to produce but to deplete our energy supplies.
carbon is just a wicked good weapon –better by far than ICBMs which are rather more obvious and retaliation-prone. Carbon and “the children”. Surely “the children” would much rather be debt slaves under someone’s American banana republic boot and whip than to run free and play. Surely they prefer bicycle helmet laws and free porn over *horrors* swingsets and slides.
Buddy, One of my cousins was a weatherman with the 8th AAF in England. He came with the first waves of B17′s. He told me, as a read later, that the loses were so great that there were barracks with one or two crews and the rest empty. The guys before a mission would be to London or the nearby city (I forget which) and get drunk. The ground crews would bring them back and either the pilot or copilot would avoid getting drunk and fly the bomber off. The the oxygen would sober them up on the way to the mission. The pilots were young and had a minimal number of flight hours in those dark days.
But they went and fought. The B17 was touted by Boeing and the AAF bomber generals as a “flying fortress”. When it cam on stream it was faster than most fighters. But it had some serious weak spots, especially in the front turret as I recall from reading.
The P47 crews in England figured out a way to install fuel barrels under the fighter that would allow the fighter to escort the 17′s to their targets and then drop the tanks and take on the Lutwaffe. But the bureaucrat at Wright-Pat objected to this since they were working on the “better way” and so the brass did not allow this improve to be used. This is another early example of the way the US and civilian military bureaucracy sacrificed our young soldiers lives. I keep a record of this but I doubt than anyone would published a book about this now, especially what is going on now is much worse.
My father was an assistant welder at the Dravo yards in Neville Island in Pittsburgh where most of the LST’s were build. Near the end of the war he noticed that the bulkhead steel they were using was too soft. One could make a scratch in the steel. After the war Dravo was sued by the Feds and settled out of court. Nobody knows how many LST’s broke apart because of this.
BTW the Navy resisted the LST design as a non ship. I could go on an on about such examples but the LST is something out of my childhood. Dad worked on the second shift.
buddy larsen said:
“carbon is just a wicked good weapon –better by far than ICBMs which are rather more obvious and retaliation-prone.”
There is another angle on the carbon tax / green energy nonsense (I actually got this after reading an article by our good friend George Soros). The problem of Peak Oil has been known since the late 1950s (Admiral Rickover made a speech about it in 1957). Unfortunately converting away from petroleum requires a huge impact on our economy that can not be justified if petroleum remains cheap. Saudi Arabia has been particularly clever about adjusting the price of raw crude to keep alternative energy research and development not cost effective. The argument implied by Soros and others is if we could tax imported petroleum to a high enough amount then we could defeat the Saudi’s low price agenda and enable alternative energy research. Unfortunately the economic fallacies with a carbon tax are fairly obvious. By calling it a “carbon tax” the money is more likely to be spent on dead-end/uneconomical green energy technologies rather than on viable concepts like nuclear and synthetic petroleum. Also the cost of energy is the foundation of the economic pyramid. If energy becomes expensive then everything else becomes expensive. If you’re a socialist (like Soros) then you probably believe that a planned economy is a good thing and macro-economics is a valid science. However it is clear that a planned economy is the road to ruin and macro-economics is not a science. There really is no alternative to the free market.
Re: 93&94.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2176792/posts?page=20#20
The whole “no time for profits” quote that they were discussing was way off the mark. Obama said “There will be a time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses—now is not that time.”
Did Cramer and Scarborough not do their research before discussing this? The companies referenced in the quote had a combined loss of 25.3 BILLION in 2008 yet handed out 26 BILLION in bonuses that were paid by the taxpayers. This is absolute insanity.
There indeed will be a time for profits but 2008 was not one of those times and thus it should not have likewise been a time for bonuses.
This privatized profits and and socialized losses crap on Wall Street has to be stopped. Cramer and Scarborough are just plain ignorant on this point.
charles, you’re a good –an especially good –internet searcher. Try finding some info on which of the presidential candidates these extreme bonus takers were financially supporting.
jay, when dad was flying –he was pilot of (one of the several unbeknownst to each other similar monikered) “Mr. Five by Five” –in late ’43 and early ’44, aircrews had a statistical one in three chance of making the 25 missions that would end their combat duty.
Two of three did not die of course, they just didn’t come back –many were POWs. Dad was at Stalag Luft 1 for 15 months before Red Army liberated the camp. He was shot down during “Big Week”, the February week in 1944 of maximum effort by 8th AAF to reduce the Luftwaffe (a D-day prep, it became later known). Dad’s last raid (his 13th, already 5 missions into ‘borrowed time’ and with 12 yet to go) was on the Messerschmidt works at Stuttgart. An engine ‘ran away’ during a climb well over the continent and then another trying to keep formation (it was the oldest plane in the squadron). On two engines he couldn’t keep in formation, and dropped out, making for the nearest safety, the Swiss border. Over Memmingen four Me 110s jumped him and made a few passes shooting up the plane but not wounding anybody. Then the 110s decided to cooperate, and all four throttled back and lined up on his 6, wingtip to wingtip out of B-17′s .50 cal range but inside their own 20 mm range, and let loose a burst through the B-17 stern to stem. Immediately all the crew checked off on the intercom and everyone was still ok, though the plane was coming undone. The 110s were weaving back there and about to do it again (they had a hard time getting slow enough to volly, which apparenly they wanted to do as a sort of gallery practice), and dad thought ‘screw it, we’re sunk, i’m saving the crew’, and dropped his landing gear, a signal meaning, ‘we’re gonna jump, or we’re gonna land’, and they baled out (all ten survived in POW camps and made it home). The plane spun down into a paper factory, taking out an industrial target on its last gasp. Dad, 22 ears old, came down in an elementary school yard, and was surrounded by German kids asking questions (he couldn’t savvy of course) and marveling at his chute when the Wehrmact rode up on a bicycle in the person of a trembling and locked & loaded finger-on-trigger teenager whose helmet fell over his eyes every time he did the hands-up motion with his rifle, which he kept doing continually until some officers came up in a car and off dad went on the POW adventure. Back in the schoolyard, women were talking and laughing, cutting up and dividing the silk chute.
Slade:
Maui wants to be green, as in Rufus’s Bioenergy Dream, so the plan is to devastate Indonesia’s Rainforests for Palm Oil, shipping it to Maui to power the electric plant. Said Plant contracted to be built by a company with no experience in large scale biodiesel!
Meanwhile, in La La Land, ex-gang member Mayor Tony Villar’s Dept of Water and Power plans a multi-gazillion dollar Solar Project, to be done in-house, despite the fact that the hard working public servants there also have no expertise in such projects.
They do have a Lactation Specialist on hand, however:
The lactation services are a part of the DWP’s double whammy to taxpayers – “The plan to issue [the] DWP-funded ‘lactation services’ contract drew howls from taxpayer advocate Walter Moore, who pointed out that the utility’s five-member board voted just last week for a package of new water and electrical rate hikes.”
Moore stated the obvious – “You couldn’t make this up…. This is such a rip-off. You’ve got to wonder if somebody’s cousin runs the lactation business.” You’ve also got to wonder what Freud would say. Perhaps those who called for rate hikes felt guilty, then relapsed to infancy and felt the need to be surrounded by nursing mothers.
The lactation specialist “cousins” and others must send in“[c]ontract proposals [which are] due to the DWP on March 7. The utility posted a 56-page document on its website seeking proposals from specialists who can spend 16 hours a week performing such tasks as workshops on pregnancy and lactation for employees.”
“The winning contractor also would be paid to show employees how to use the department’s ‘breast pump program in traditional and nontraditional work environments.’” DWP workers should only learn for the “nontraditional work environment,” since they obviously work in a very different kind of place.
This boob of a project “is expected to cost about $50,000.”
Doug –have a laff, this movie is America after a few more years of educated folk having few babies and wards of the state having many.
BuddyL yea,I have seen that article before. What can i say? Now I have never been ( I cannot assert that more) in those parts of the world,mind you, but strangely, I have all of these great stories to tell about my time there. How can this be?
Anyway, it is all starting to add up, and it is getting harder to use the opening “well maybe I am paranoid, but…”
Something is afoot. Makes you hope that the Almighty will step in and cause things to gang agley, at least once.
The real kicker is the meme “the greatest crisis since….”. As you well know, this could be turned around in 4 quarters if the Democrats did the right thing.
I know that you say that they are stupid; well, i do not buy that. Nobody is that stupid, nobody with that kind of cash that can buy good advice behaves this stupidly.
You know if I were Obama, I would have really gone bipartisan. If it were really such a huge crisis, and my heart was with the country, I would have sent Rudy down to Wall St. and said “Fix it. Find out the culprits and expose them. Findout who knows how to fix this and let him do it.” I would have said to the country: “I sent the hero of 911 down there to brave anther attack; and I have told Too stand with him as thet did in those desperate days.” (or somethin’). Rudy would have answered the call and have plenty of democrats on his team.) With real investigations it would have gotten the whole Reid-Pelosi-Franks-Soros coven out of his hair for good, and he would be a free operator. His promise of ethical change would put him completely beyond reproach and would serve as a model for a half a century.
Can you imagine how popular he would be if he got Pelosi and Reid off the national stage and had Soros squirming in the docket. I’d vote for him (not really).
I would draft Palin and Fred and send them out into the hinterlands and say:
“You find out what people really need, find out what they think is right. Get an honest and frank dialog going. Let us have real unity and find that common ground. I will listen and we will work together and do it right; together we sell it to the American people. I will stand by you no matter what.”
If I were a just too gobsmacked of a Keynesian to give it up, I would take that pork and spend it on the military. Green tech? Lets get it working for our military first. I would send the message to the world “See we are so smart that we can Fight the WOT and fight Climate change!” (OK, so i would leave out the climate stuff).
I would get Bush and Bill Clinton to get the unions and the auto industry to do profit sharing and stop the class BS.
I would have Hillary and Bill going out there to tell the NGO’s, the Davos crowd and the UN to just give it a break for a couple of years.
and I would just go bomb the dickens out of Iran.
That is what I would do.
And he, more than anyone else on the planet could do this.He would get away with it. The usual suspects would be dumbfounded into silence for a year. He could whip his side into line. The GOP would be falling all over themselves to help him, and Conservatives would be doing more than a little soul searching about him, the Democrats and Liberals in general. The moonbat left would be marginalized and the Media finally tamed, and the whole country would tkank him for it (well, most of it).
It would cost him nothing politically, it in fact would secure his second term and he would go down in history as more than a curiosity and a cautionary tale. He would be FDR and Ronald Reagan rolled into one, at least in the minds of most of the electorate. “Hope and Change” would mean something other than code words for The Great Leap Forward Chicago Style.
Why does he not do it? The ultimate answer to me is either 1) that he wants to destroy us, or 2) he is not running things, or 2.5) They would blow his head off if he tried.
I cannot think of no other explanations. It cannot be stupidity. It is not very difficult to understand what to do. It is obvious as could be. I think that the middle that voted for him actually expected something like this.
LOL
The President seems pretty down to Earth compared to what we have now!
Dough, you mean Bush Sr.? Yeah, it seems as distant ow as the Civil war, doesn’t it?
Now remember this was that remote plutocrat that was amazed to discover how checkouts work in supermarkets.
Dough=Doug:
Nah, check out the IMDB Trailer from Buddy’s #106 link!
Here it is.
Back to Naval Warfare:
Sea explorers probing the depths of the English Channel have discovered what they say is a legendary British warship that sank in a fierce storm in 1744 with the loss of more than 900 men and possibly four tons of gold coins valued at $1 billion.
exactly, exaCTLY, THAT’s what is scaring me –1), 2), and 2.5) are the ONLY explanations.
You? you’d also pick up the phone, you would, and call in three people, Bernanke, Geithner, and Jim Cramer, and say, “Cramer, go run the SEC. Tomorrow, we suspend rule 157 and reinstate the rulebook as it was before that uptic change.” and you’d say to Bernanke & Geithner: “i figured out the problem: we have assets that have value, but no market. this makes them seem of no value. Why is there no market? because there is no market for assets with no value. Why is there no value? because there is no market. Why is there no market? because there is no value. DO YOU MORONS GET WHAT I’M SAYING? Go use Robert’s Rents, go use the value of rent, like always before the communist conspiracy snuck up and chemically or psychically lobotomized you!”
In days we would be in a new world, and that is, literally. jobs, hiring, assets worth something and in trade.
Sas you say, this ain’t rockert science.
he went to the doctor, whose official diagnosis was “patient is ‘tarded & f**ked up.”
was that NELSON’s ship? The same “HMS Victory”? If so, the Brits will go WILD –he’s numero uno national hero. maybe they can deport their paki jihadis now?
cannot think of ANY other explanation* (Sheesh)
Buddy,
Nelson’s flagship is still safely anchored at Portsmouth. The vessel in the story is an earlier ship of the same name.
Mongoose,
Shame on you for repeating that old wives tale about Bush Sr. He was merely expressing surprise at a new type of scanner he hadn’t seen before. Surely after all the recent hype about Obama being cut off from all his electronic gadgets, you could understand someone in the White House not being up to speed on what the local supermarkets have installed this year.
Kirk: that was sarcasm on my part.
I have nothing but respect for Bush Sr. and nothing but contempt for that bit of agitprop and the jackals who came up with it. One has to be particularly vile to think up a lie like that one.
Well, my post equating Nelson’s honor with the honorable Tom Daschle, was sent into the Ethernetherworld, so I, at least, feel ashamed.
Why do some get so excercised about minor glitches and oversights on IRS paperwork?
Tom was always so welcoming to conservative nominees in the Senate!
A man of legendary integrity.
How many of US have $750 red eyeglass frames, huh?
Doug, I think you are confusing “legendary” with “mythical”.
What does Bob Dole have to say about the matter?
It would sure clear thing up for me.
just sayin’
Doug -
The nanny state sucks.
Daschle is George Mitchell’s pro, or perhaps amateur, tege. Mitchell, your new Special Israel Backstabber, oops i mean, Envoy to the Mideast, the place known to many Democrats as part of “that thing out there where you have to get on a airplane or a ship to get there”.
Mitchell is my teacher. Before he got into my tv set as Senate minority leader of the putsch to ruin Reagan, i had never seen anybody so soft-voiced, so reasonable-sounding, so able to stare so innocently into the lense without a trace of shame and tell such howling dirty lies about the other party that I hardly believed it could be legal.
Tom Daschle, a semi-midget from the Badlands, took over from George Mitchell, as Senate soft-voiced sweet-smiling sincere liar and character assassin Majority Leader, a perch from which for years he trashed and gutted dozens and dozens of GOP nominees, with particular nastiness and shameless assassin glee, for no other reason than they were the other party, and utterly regardless of whether or not they would be good at the job, good for the country, had earned with a lifetime of service better treatment, or had always had dignified and respectable relations with Dems previously.
No, he was a Lung-Ripper all the way, a twisted 7 smarmy little gnomeful of bile, and one of the real authors of the new blood-sport style of DC, currently so edifying and uplifting of Americans. And always the sweet, quiet, understated voice –just look at current senate majority leader Whisperin’ Hairy Reid, doing the same shtik.
We ain’t seen nothin yet, to quote another legendary figure.
…and Nobel Laureate to boot.
Somehow, I think the Idiocracy is already here.
Speakin Softly but carryin a Big Shtik.
Kirk Parker @ #118: thanks for straightening that out. Had i thought another sec, i’d've recalled a tv special on History channel (or somesuch) some year or two ago, Prince Andrew took the cameras on a tour of HMS Victory in Portsmouth.
Buddy, do you think Mossad will get in the game and start screwing with these clowns?
Not wetwork, but just spin them around, reputations, traps, ruin, run them through halls of mirrors, disinformation, misdirection, that sort of thing?
Up the anti with putin or the pakis?
Heaven knows they are like goys in crown heights. I doubt that O and the new mario brothers over at Langley could parse it at all.
what wise men are left could be played to, I’d wager/
Mongoose,
Sorry I missed your <sarcasm> tags! Please accept my apologies.
Buddy,
For those of us who have had the pleasure of setting foot on HMS Victory, no mistake is possible. She’s the oldest serving commissioned warship in the world, and a wonderful way to spend an afternoon if you ever find yourself in Portsmouth!
Back when I was prowling gun shows, I found a copy of a little book titled “Sole Survivor” written by Ensign Geo.Gay about Torpedo Squadron 8 and the Battle of Midway. What makes the book special to me is Gay’s signature in the flyleaf with the comment “Keep America Strong”. I keep it with a copy of the August 31, 1942 issue of Life Magazine which has Gay on the cover and a very good contemporay story of his action at Midway. Whenever I see the Midway movie on TV or read about what a miracle day that was for the US, I feel proud to have a little connection with the Greatest Generation. I was born in August 1942 and spent 1967 in Vietnam. I hope my grandkids have something left to fight for after the next four years. Keep America Strong works for me.
those guys are so deep, Mongoose, that they could be going balls out already just to keep things as good as they are, however not so good that may be. I do note that the Israelis are mighty sanguine re the roll-out of the Mullah Bomb –so they probably have penetrated that program. If so, well, expect a few russkie techs to go up too, when the processing accident happens. Mazel tof!
That’s yet another particular outrage, that a people who in living memory were very nearly deliberately and systematically and extraordinarily cruelly erased from the planet –by Europeans no less, the founders & keepers of western civilization –have to again endure that threat, and again while civilization as a whole studies its fingernails and harumphs.
Buddy – excellent story about your father – especially good the whole crew made it back.
Mind if I ask – what did your father do before and after the war?
Buddy, well God gave them back about 30 million Muslims, hardly seems like a ggod deal to me, Oh don’t get me started… I cano go on for days…
Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,
Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schließen,
Und meine heißen Tränen fließen.
(Heine)
Buddy, they are nowhere near balls out yet. Not even close.
Those with eyes to see will know when they are at that point.
Amazing that someone would see this blog who has a signed copy of Torpedo 8′s only survivor’s book. Amazing too, to realize that HMS Victory, of the Napoleonic Wars, is a 19th century warship, same as the iron dreadnaughts on the other end of it.
I’m a big “Right of Return” man, myself.
…for Jews and Christians throughout the Muslim World.
Me, I want to bring the troops home, by way of Tehran and Riyadh.
Slowly.
Oilpatch, Ic –he was a student at University of Texas when war broke out, went hurry up to finish in Geology so he could enlist and as he said, ‘quit feeling like the only s.o.b. in Texas not in uniform’. He went to work for Shell Oil after the war –had to break out on a field crew mapping swamps all over the deep south (i was born during that time, deeeep in an Alabama bottom), worked his way up & retired in the mid 1980s as VP of exploration at Mesa Petroleum, Boone Pickens’ original, oil & gas drilling, pre-wall street takeover artist, outfit. i look back at his associates, guys who were always aroun when i was a youngstert, what a trove of WW2 hall of famers –tho not a one of ‘em ever thought of it that way. There was a Spitfire pilot with burn scars on his face, Martin McAndrews, A paratrooper who jumped on St. Mere Eglise and had a permanent tic in his eye from a bayonet fight to the death with a German soldier (“a kid” said Lloyd the one time i heard him tell the tale) that night, Lloyd Kimbrell, a B-24 pilot who flew the famous or should i say notorious Ploesti Raid, Harry Fisher. Others, many.
My brother-in-law’s dad passed away less than a year ago –we knew he had ‘been in the war’ but that’s about it. On his death a few old guys showed up and talked, and brought clippings and old papers. Turns out the old boy had gone in with the first wave at Leyte, still a teenager, an anti-tank gunner, made it thru three days of combat where his crew knocked out five tanks but then got blown up by grenade or mortar or shell along with his crew, laid on the ground playing dead while a Japanese patrol searched the bodies including him, was rescued a day later by an American patrol, had shrapnel in his head, arm, and so much in his leg he almost lost it, spent nearly two years in hospital mostly in Frisco, and arrived home in Lafayette Louisiana weighing exactly half what he had weighed when he had left the same station to go overseas. Robert Earl Billeaud. In all the time i knew him, all the yakety yak we did about duck hunting and fence building and horses and and cows and dogs and what not, never a word did he say about the war. But some old guys with partial uniforms showed up when he died, and blew taps.
Reading about the trees for the HMS, “90% of which were Oak.”
…we had two main forms of Oak on the farm, Live and White.
The Live would turn into a white moldy mulch within 2 years in wet earth, while the White was used for fence posts.
Never looked into the details about that.
(no doubt if we’d had the ‘Net @ the time, I would have!)
doug, the RN cut it’s oak somewhat ahead of time –they cured it for like seven years or somesuch, before building a ship with it. must’ve been expensive that first ship, keeping the shipwrights waiting for 7 years while the wood cured. later, General Motors hired the RN project manager. (joke)
Amazing stories Buddy.
It was such a privilege to grow up amongst those men.
Polar opposites of the Daschle mold.
Barry’s spent his life makin up his life story,
they lived it and never told.
a ship like HMS Victory required a forest. Those were BIG ships –carrying thousand man crews. fifty miles or something of rope. When you knew the ropes, you were something!
doug 141, you hit the nail on the head –
That wiki article says it was customary to frame the ship, then cover it and let it cure for several months, but…
“However, the end of the Seven Years’ War meant that she remained in this condition for nearly three years, which helped her subsequent longevity”
GM’s still curing it’s magic batteries, and Mat and Charles are waitin for ‘em!
…Mat’s become quite the eco salesman!
Those men would punch pukes like Daschle right in the nose right on the floor of the Senate, laughing as the security people walked them off. the security people would laugh too.
How low we have fallen.
well, i got the 7 years out of my fuddled memory bank, maybe i wuz thinking of the seven years war. but do it say how long the wood had cured before they framed with it?
Buddy – yeah, not many of them left. There’s an old crusty guy in this area (Maine), veteran of Iwo Jima; had his 18th or 19th birthday on board ship just before landing. He used to sub in the elementary schools here. He showed up one day to fill in in music class and he had his guitar and harmonica/harmonica holder. He used to live in Vermont and he knew the path that Frost used in his poem “Stopping…..” (two roads diverged in a yellow wood).
I was thinking earlier about Joshua Chamberlain who became a college president (Bowdoin, I think) after his civil war experience. Theres another guy here who (now retired) built a business selling/tending blueberry fields and selling Christmas trees. In the Navy he had been, eventually, Admiral Rickover’s butt boy (probably cost him a star I bet) but he headed the group which investigated the Thresher accident; after, he (and Rickover) went out on the first dive on every new sub put out. Another guy spent 8 months in a hospital after a Viet Cong put a bullet (and other stuff) through his hat (which he still has). He is a successful, hard working wood cutter….there are lots others, not so many WWII, but Korea, Vietnam etc etc vets. I guess what I am getting at is, if someone wonders where we get such people, just look around. They are there, even if they don’t advertise that fact.
No, but I’ll bet awhile.
Somehow, just about every species turns rock hard here after a few years.
Makes you yearn for when we used to slap together wet lumber and call ourselves carpenters!
buddy. It took technology advances just to get the saws and tools to hew, cut and carpenter those old English Oaks for those ships. English Oaks are really tough. Not like our average oak trees here.
mongoose, i was thinking that very thought this afternoon, when tv showed Max Baucus read a prepared statement supporting “accidental tom” Daschle, standing behind him was among other habitual liars was “cut off limbs, cut off heads, wired genitals to generators” John Kerry, arranging his face for the camera a few beats too long as the camera caught him suddenly quit prettying up and resolve to Stern and Wise Senator Face. i thought, my god, how did we cede washington to these third rate pukes?
so many tax accidents, you’d think someone would’ve OVER paid, law of averages and all.
Ic, for sure –a not inconsiderable number have written in right here on this thread –i sometime wonder if boomer academia is so reflexively anti-Iraq war because the gray ponytails don’t want vets showing up in their communism classes.
Think of the PTSD that JFK2 must suffer every time he sees a rerun of Phil Hartman pulling his arms off as the Soviet Weightlifter in the All Drug Olympics!
a very fine tribute here
Memorial Day essay from years ago, unforgettable, by Victor Davis Hanson, of his namesake uncle, killed on Okinawa, iirc the last day of the very, very grim battle of Sugarloaf Hill.
Thing is buddy, when I get away from the liberals almost everyone feels like you and I do. Shock, disgust sorrow–even remorse–with the decline just hangs on the air, especially with those of us over 50.
I wonder just how much of a minority we truly are. Lots of wounded souls and cautious hearts…maybe they can yet speak out. How to find the turning back, back to what we truly are and should be? It must be done. I often think us the larger army.
The uberlibs are in a fog, what happens if it blows away?
The core cadre of the left are villains and know well what they are about. So the evil are. What heart is left in that gullible layers beyond them? We might be surprised. It is a sickness of the soul, and these folks, well, weakness within causes them to cleave toward that evil, call it good, but surely something is salvageable.
I have always said that I was born a hundred years to late or a hundred years too early. I knew this when I was 5. It will take much to reinvogorate us. And a long time will pass too.
[snip from link]
For most of my lifetime, I heard only rumors in my family of the tragedy that Victor’s death entailed. His grandparents died shortly after in deep depression; my father, who had graduated from the same high school and college at the same time with him, and who joined the Marines with him (before transferring to the Army Air Corps to fly on 39 B-29 missions), rarely talked about how the loss had wrecked the close-knit Swedish farm family. Occasionally strange what-ifs surfaced — had he really been killed just hours before the mountain was stormed? Had he lived, would he have farmed the home place? Been a teacher? Had a family nearby our own? For the past 40 years I have bumped into dozens of residents of his small hometown of nearby Kingsburg, who although strangers, on recognizing my name, used to lectured on what a good man Victor was — he was killed at 23 — and how hard it would be for anyone to live up to such a namesake.
But mostly my family remained quiet, and either did not know the exact circumstances of Victor’s death, or — more likely — chose over the half century to remain silent about it. Now that my father and all who knew Victor in the family are gone, I decided to discover what had happened on May 18, 1945.
Mongoose,
Laura Ingraham’s a real warrior on that front, esp so now that she’s raising a young one.
She was all over the Senate wrt Daschle this am.
Had on Cornin, who’s delivered 4,500 babies, now has the most pro death President in history he must put up with.
i dunno how it happened either. maybe it didn’t happen. maybe DC has always been a cesspool. this damn instant net, destroyer of the ancient atavistic limbic wired link between time and space, may well be causing us to hallucinate and see thar be’est dragonnes
One gets stuck –stuck working, stuck raising family, stuck maintaining property, stuck researching markets, stuck stuck stuck. get the kids raised then they marry up and have babies and one is stuck again, one can’t take to the woods a Wolverine, or join the local crime syndicate and run for office; why, one is grandpappy now –just be jolly, dammit, and shut up. One just never seems to find what to do about the Dismal Tide in the City We Send Money To.
what will happen soon, we’ll hear of local meetings, someone will gut up and call a county rally to figure out what in the hell is going on. Then some people will start acting somewhere outside their heads. Sit ins in front of federal buildings. can you imagine 500 50-60 year olds mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore? Heh –”We May Be Slow But We Got MONEY”
One thing that gives me hope is that our soldiers of today will one day come home and I’m confidant they’ll be bringing their character, experience, and determination with them.
I just returned from eight days on Sand Island, Midway Atoll. It was my second trip…was out there 10 years ago when Ballard found the Yorktown. Today the US Fish and Wildlife Service run the place and have made it pretty much impossible for the public to get there. Most of all of the WWII Navy base buildings are gone and the tree huggers want to get rid of the rest of it. Still, there’s something about the place that is haunting. According to the biologists, some of the albatross on island may have actually been alive during the June 2 42 attack…hard to imagine, but their are a couple million birds hanging around. The best book I’ve read on Midway was by the official Navy historian Prang- “Miracle at Midway”. The signal intelligence/code breaking part of the story is really intriguing and is what allowed the US fleet to be on station waiting for the Japs. In post #86, John B mentioned Admiral Maurer. I had the good fortune to buy the Admiral’s house in Lanikai, Hawaii back in the mid 90′s. When tearing out a wall, I found several old B&W photos of the Admiral at his office ..maybe late 30′s or early 40′s when he was a Commander…could have been Submarine HQ in New London, CT?. What was notable is that there wasn’t even a phone on his desk, just an intercom. Amazing that we were so technically poor then and ramped up so fast to win the war. How is it that we are now led by jabbering clueless buffoons, who as Jim Cramer says “Know Nothing!
@sigintel,
They did it without a Blackberry.
sigintel,
Do you live on Oahu?
…long ago I had a girlfriend that went to Barry’s School, (Punahoe) her dad was an Admiral.
Granddad, a veteran of the infamous Blacksox.
“Say it ain’t so, Doug!”
How do they say
“It Ain’t So” in Chicago,
when it IS?
(Pretending to be Pre-Blago)
So what do we say to the spirits of the men Of ‘Ron 8 when they hear that NATO wants to ship it’s war supplies to afganistan through IRAN?
36. Michael Hoskins:
Do you remember vertrepping from the White Plains off RVN in the China sea?
52. buddy larsen:
The unfortunate Admiral Gormley… His son was one of my captains I served under in White Plains…
I am not saying it was a crossing of paths, but interesting things I had no knowledge at that time.
Tomw @ 170, the way the story is in my mind, from reading of course, is that the IJN had really been busting up USN, stuck close in on call a bombardment mission for the unpredictable enemy infantry attacks along the Marine positions. “Ironbottom Sound” as they called the growing ship graveyard–Battle of Santa Cruz for starters was a USN disaster –so Gormey’s decision to retire could just as well have been correct as wrong. It was a harsh cookie crumble. No sooner than he had moved the fleet to the high seas, where it could not be a bullseye-in-place, the abandonement of the Marines became the issue (General Officers raising hell all the way up the chain). And then the man himself had gone dark, and had stress breakouts of skin problems, and seemed depressed.
Meanwhile, Bull Halsey was looking like the high energy bright outlook aggressive leader the whole campaign needed –so out with Gormley and in with the Bull. The first thing Halsey did was go ashore (Gormley had never, tho of course Marines are Navy too) and hang out with the Marines, eating their rations, sometimes shirtless like everybody, around campfires and such. Instant bond, instant escalation of morale in a dark green wet diseased hell where morale in the long half year of deadly combat was critical to a victory that was never assured until the enemy decided to quit the place.
IIRC, General Armin von Roon (see Wouk’s “War and Remembrance” upthread) put Guadacanal alongside Midway as decisive strategic victories.
doug, “Say it ain’t so Joe!” a young kid hollered at a Blacksox, it was overheard by a reporter and went onto the front page and became the icon of the hurt the fix had put on the people.
@Doug 164…moved out of Hawaii several years ago. I get back frequently (married to a local girl)and now live in the wild west of old Mejico.
sigintel, i’ll bet near Guadalajara around Lake Chapala. Lots of NorteAmericanos there.
Buddy, one o f my favorite movies was
(as I recall) “The Gallant Hours.”
Had James Cagney as Halsey. Looked like him and talked like him. Uncanny.
Saw a special on Cagney in his later years on his upstate New York farm. Showed his Hollywood mementos. Most prominent display? Him as The Bull.
The relief of The Canal was a mighty fine hour.
yep, the gyrenes and dogfaces were down to captured Japanese rations, by the time the Bull got the Navy squared away.
Cagney as Bull Halsey –jeez –a match made in …hmmm…well somewhere.
Yep. “The Gallant Houra” is the name. Released in 1960. Looking for a DVD?
Ever read of Mitchell Paige? MOH same place.
Chesty Puller made great use of automatic weapons. Joe Fosse, in a Wildcat, got 23 of his 26 victories there.
Throw in The Bull and that time the Alamo won.
Two thank yous here. First, of course, to those brave warriors who challenged Kido Butai that June day. Secondly to those who posted this film, for which I have been searching for years.
I was 13 when I read of Torpedo 8 in John Toland’s wonderful book of the early war with Japan, But Not in Shame. I committed to memory both Waldron’s letter to his men and his tender letter to his wife. His conclusion has haunted me all these years.
” I miss you and the girls so very much and I long to be with you. But I could not be happy ashore at this time. My place is here, with the fight.”
Ten years later James Michener’s character of the Admiral in The Bridges at Toko ri spoke for all those like the men of Torpedo 8 when in eulogizing the slain Commander Brubaker he asked,
“Where do we get such men?!”
I do not know how to answer that question, but I know we still do get such men.
nice post, exkaydet65.
great names, dave. Fosse is one of my long time heroes –can you imagine flying against the Zero in a Wildcat? Only defensive tactics –the thatch weave & such –gave you a chance. I have an old copy of “Zero!” by IJN warriors Masatake Okumiya and Jiro Horikoshi (translated by the reliable and dedicated Martin Caiden), it’s pretty revealing how little the pilots feared the Wildcat, for the simple reason they could evade combat at will, per tactical circumstances. As a rule, Wildcat pilots rarely had such choice.
Between Lt. Cmndr. Waldron’s final written communiques, to wife and to squadron,
“I miss you and the girls so very much and I long to be with you. But I could not be happy ashore at this time. My place is here, with the fight.”
and
“If there is only one plane left to make a final run-in, I want that man to go in and get a hit. May God be with us all. Good luck, happy landings, and give ‘em hell.”
is everything, everything there can be, between the two eternities.