Posted on 02/19/2017 8:35:58 AM PST by Oldpuppymax
+1
My Dad was there as well and managed to survive. He didn’t have much to day about it, even after many years. A couple of years ago we had to move him into an assisted care facility. One of the few items that he insisted on taking with him was his KA-BAR from Iwo.
I don’t think the Marines got the worst of it at Guadalcanal ...the Navy did.
“Which is one of the reasons the decision was made to drop the Bomb.”
We could have skipped a lot of the island hopping and won the war with tens of thousands less dead American Marines if we just built more submarines. The combination of subs and aircraft carriers sunk almost all the Japanese fleet assets and more importantly their merchant shipping assets.
An Iowa class BB cost $100 million....a Gato class Sub cost less than $3 million. We ended up strangling Japan and could have done it much faster and with much less loss of life.
During the battle of Guadalcanal, not one American sub did any damage to the JIN...an almost shameful dereliction of duty by the our Naval Commanders.
In the end it was just as much about Japan’s people starving to death and the inability to replace ships, airplanes and any other war materials; then realize that in the last year the JIN couldn’t send their naval assets where they were needed because they had no fuel!
The war against Japan is an interesting case study in modern warfare. At the end they were actually getting better at ASW. Their ships were getting decent sonar in 1945. Too little too late... The suicide run of the IJN Yamato is case study. The Jap ASW screen around her was almost perfect during her end run.
‘Hymn to the Fallen’ on YOutube.
The US might have done a better job of replacing the terrible torpedoes the sub drivers were stuck with for almost 2 years.
The misspelling of Guadal Canal was my fault. It has been corrected on the Coach’s Team site but I’m unable to do so on the FR post. My apologies.
Several decades ago, as an Immigration Officer I worked with a Customs officer who was a Marine and Iwo Jima veteran, Vaughn Shaw, originally from Mars Hill, ME or thereabouts. Great guy, good officer, wrote poetry, gentle, but tough as nails. He enlisted with his best friend, whose name I have forgotten. They went through Marine training together, and hit the beach together. His friend had a premonition that he would not make it off the beach alive. Very serious about it. While on the beach, in a shell hole, with all sorts of metal and lead flying about, Vaughn’s best friend looked right at him and said, “Vaughn, I think I’m going to make it!” Those were his last words, as a shell fragment or bullet ripped through his head just as the words left his mouth.
My dad wouldn’t/couldn’t talk about it either. Each time I asked him about it, he changed the subject and started asking me questions about Viet Nam.
One of the WWII vets in my battalion gave me a little bag of black volcanic sand from the batch he picked up when he and some other Iwo vets went back on a guided tour. I treasure it.
Hey, no sweat to you. I was just grousing about not being able to send commo to the original author without exposing myself to the google whore. Dat’s all! 8)
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