Posted on 05/06/2015 4:28:24 PM PDT by WhiskeyX
The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought between the Japanese and Allied navies from May 4 through May 8, 1942 in the Coral Sea, about 500 miles northeast of Australia. Occurring only six months after the surprise Japanese attack on American forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and a month before the decisive battle at Midway, it was one of the first naval battles fought in the Pacific during World War II. The battle, roughly a draw, was an important turning point in the Pacific campaign. My uncle, Bill Leu, fought at the Battle of the Coral Sea on the tanker, U.S.S. Neosho, which was attacked by dozens of Japanese dive bombers and heavily damaged, as described below. I've dedicated this section of my website to my uncle Bill and to all of the men in the Allied forces who fought in this battle.
(Excerpt) Read more at delsjourney.com ...
I don’t know a lot about the battle. I know we lost a little more than the Japs but we stopped them from maybe invading Australia.
I do think it was important that the American Navy was the first to show they could stand up to the Japanese Navy.
Very nice. My Father’s field artillery batallion shipped to the Philippines in June, 1945 to join in the invasion of Japan. If the invasion had taken place, I might not be here.
Thank you for the posting. A very interesting story.
Coral Sea was unprecedented: the first battle fought at sea, where the opposing warships never caught sight of each other.
Every bit of attack and defense was conducted by aircraft ... a hint of things to come.
And my father’s PBY unit had orders to depart for Okinawa. The week before this happened, they dropped the bomb and he never went.
We lost the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington and the destroyer Hammond. They lost a carrier too.And I believe the cruiser ‘’Mikuma’’.But you’re right, it convinced the Japs to abandon plans to invade Australia.
Following Coral Sea the Americans never stopped advancing and the Japanese never stopped retreating The USN never lost another battle to the Japanese. IMHO the battle was far from a draw. The Japanese advance down the Solomons was stopped never to start again following the decisive victory at Midway. While admittedly hind sight I think we sometimes fail to see the importance of seemingly small events. I think the Coral Sea was one of these events.
It was a tactical defeat but a strategic victory. We lost more ships but stopped them from advancing, which until that time, seemed like no one could.
In the middle of this, Corregidor surrendered. I always wondered if MacArthur had not screwed up so badly, we might have eventually been able to reinforce/rescue those guys. (If the U.S. hadn't of needed a hero at that time, Mac would have been court-martialed for all his blunders.)
Time to dredge up that bitter bit of doggerel those abandoned guys said:
We're the battling bastards of Bataan
No mamma, no pappa, no Uncle Sam
No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
And nobody gives a damn!
“We lost the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington and the destroyer Hammond. They lost a carrier too.And I believe the cruiser ‘’Mikuma’’.But you’re right, it convinced the Japs to abandon plans to invade Australia.”
The Japanese offensive was not planned to invade Australia. All efforts to recommend the Japanese invasion of Australia were rejected because there was not enough shipping to transport and supply the Japanese invasion forces. As an alternative plan the Japanese navy suggested and implemented a campaign to capture the Solomon Islands and Port Moresby, new Guinea as stepping stones to capture many of the South Pacific Islands, including Tahiti. Using the South Pacific Islands to base airfields, the Japanese planned to interdict all air and sea communications and thereby isolate Australia and New Zealand from outside trade, supply, and defenses.
Japanese agents covertly negotiated with prominent members of Australia’s Government and influential who showed interest in an Australian surrender to the Japanese with or without a Japanese invasion to force capitulation. These Australians negotiating an Australian surrender to the Japanese were unaware of what Japan had planned for them. Captured British Commonwealth soldiers imprisoned in the Japanese POW camp/s in Southeast Asia were being subjected to a secret Japanese experiment. The Japanese Army was feeding rice to the POWs, but the rice had been specially treated to remove much of the nutritional benefit out of every grain of the rice. The objective was to see how long it would take for the White race POWs to waste away in their health and die due to the effects of malnutrition. If the experiment proved to be satisfactory in exterminating White race people, the Australians and New Zealanders were to be put into internment camps, and the specially treated rice was to be used as the source of nutrition. As the internees perished due to the effects of the malnutrition and internment, Japan planned to re-colonize Australia and New Zealand with replacement Japanese colonists.
“In the middle of this, Corregidor surrendered. I always wondered if MacArthur had not screwed up so badly, we might have eventually been able to reinforce/rescue those guys. (If the U.S. hadn’t of needed a hero at that time, Mac would have been court-martialed for all his blunders.)”
First, I’m going to disclaim being any sort of a fan of Douglas MacArthur. That said, however, you are completely wrong in blaming MacArthur for the failure of the Philippine Defensive Campaign. If anyone was responsible for the failure of the Philippine Defensive Campaign it was Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marshall, and President Quezon. For years before the military campaign, these men tied the hands of MacArthur and his command by wrongly assuming there was no way of successfully defending the Philippines against a Japanese invasion. Despite all of the disadvantages these men imposed on MacArthur’s command, they still very nearly succeeded in defeating the Japanese invasion forces on Luzon. MacArthur’s men ran out of munitions and other key support at the very moment they had put the Japanese invasion force into retreat towards their landing beaches. After that failure in combat support, MacArthur and his command had no further viable choice but to retreat into the Bataan Peninsula, where they had already concluded before the war would be doomed to eventual defeat without the assistance of a relieving American force from overseas. Even then the Bataan force defeated the initial Japanese offensive force, and their commanders recommended withdrawal. Instead, the Japanese Field Marshal diverted a Japanese force from a different assignment outside the Philippines in order to reinforce the Japanese offensive on the Bataan front. Eisenhower advised the War Department to not send any relieving force to what he wrongly assumed could only be a failed defensive campaign. The physically weakened and inadequately supplied American forces in Bataan were therefore forced into surrendering.
One day while visiting my dad, (he served on USS Yorktown from 1940 until she was sunk at Midway), he seem sort of off in a different world. I asked what was on his mind. He said he was just thinking about a question never asked or answered. I asked him what he meant. He told me that on the day before the battle of the Coral Sea began, the engine room chief my dad worked for told him, the next time we go to GQ, your new GQ station is Engine room lower level. Some one else will take your place in Repair 5. My dad did as the chief instructed and never asked why? (in those days the only answer expected by the chief was aye, aye). The next day they went to GQ. My dad, as instructed, remained in the engine room. Nothing happened to the ship that day. The next day, the Japanese got lucky and dropped a 500 lb. bomb on the Yorktown. It went through the flight deck and the armor deck and exploded in Repair 5s area. Most of the men at that station were killed, including the young man assigned to replace my dad on #2 hose team. My dad often wondered why the chief changed his GQ station, but you never asked a chief in those days why he did anything. My dad said that move saved his life.
“Where can you provide a link to this claim of collusion between “Japanese agents’’ and ‘’prominent members of Australia’s government’’?”
The information came from several sources one and more decades ago. They appeared to be very solid and included images of some documents, so they could not be dismissed as mere rumors. I did not keep notes at the time, and I no longer recall. Every time this topic comes up I make a stab at locating one of my old sources or a new source online, but with no success so far. Readers may be able to help me relocate one of the sources.
The information about the treated rice came from the story about a U.S. Army intelligence officer responsible for the end of war OSS parachute team responsible for securing the safe transfer of the POWs from Japanese to Allied custody. This is the same U.S. Army officer who was allegedly given the assignment of taking an Army patrol to intercept a Japanese Army reconnaissance patrol operating out of Magdalena Bay in Baja California into Arizona in about 1916. According to the story he successfully intercepted the Japanese reconnaissance patrol in the desert, but the Japanese chose to fight to the death and were buried where they fell in the Arizona desert. If anyone should happen to remember which book had that story, I should be able to find that book somewhere in my personal library. It’s been a real annoyance for some years now that I can’t remember which book has that information.
Lots of pros and cons on this, depending upon which camp you are in.
It is my understanding that Mac got a lot of bad orders from Marshall, whom I also blame. However, the lag in getting the aircraft out of Clark Field was criminal. He didn’t implement Rainbow 5 as ordered and didn’t send the bombers out to Formosa as planned. (Jap fliers who were ordered to bomb that airfield thought they were on a suicide mission as the Americans would have been alerted by Pearl Harbor and were waiting for them. Instead, our aircraft were neatly lined up while Mac was inactive and in a funk in Manila. We lost air cover - and the Philippines at that moment.)
He didn’t believe that Japan would attack before April ‘42 and planned his defense based on expected reinforcements, not what limited resources he then had.
Plan Orange called for an immediate retreat to the Bataan peninsula, but nothing was done to beef up the its defenses and Mac didn’t send supplies there until too late and had to burn them, as well as much needed food. He also let thousands of fleeing civilians down there, who ate up a lot of the needed food. This litany of poor judgement goes on and on.
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