Posted on 05/26/2024 5:35:42 AM PDT by Jacquerie
Where our Sailors Rest.
“If you ever want to sleep with a blonde again, you had better shoot down these bastards as soon as they come up” – a destroyer captain motivates his exhausted crew shortly before a kamikaze attack. The sea-battle toll for Okinawa that ended on June 21st 1945 was 36 U.S. warships sunk and 368 damaged. Almost 5,000 sailors were killed in action and another 5,000 wounded.
War naturally conjures images of courageous infantrymen. Gettysburg, Flanders Fields and not the Coral Sea or Leyte Gulf.
Too often forgotten are the heroic Navy, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine sailors felled at sea. It’s understandable; there are no battlefield memorials, no marked graves, no poppies, no flags. Presidents and dignitaries visit Normandy and not Midway or Iron Bottom Sound. Few are the photo memoirs of engineering room slaughter-by-steam, of those who inhaled fire, of those blown overboard, of those who survived the battle only to die of burns, thirst, or sharks.
Hoses washed the remains of many off their ships. Some had proper burials. Did boot camp recruits know their Navy-issue hammocks did double duty as burial shrouds? I don’t know, but should your Memorial Day weekend find you on an Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf of Mexico beach, you are graveside.
Take time to say a few words of thanks.
And Osama? Didn’t happen.
I read it in the Seymour Hersh book “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden”. Lies throughout by the Kenyan administration. Trump has to let the Seal team come forward and say what really happened. Trump can protect them.
Beautiful.
George Pfiefers book “Tennozan: The Battle for Okinawa” gives a pretty stark and brutal look at the organized “Floating Chrysanthemum” Kamikaze operations launched against the Okinawa invasion fleet.
These weren’t haphazard lone wolf attacks - they were directed and focused human guided aircraft loaded with explosives and gasoline designed to sink the transports.
The Destroyer fleet on radar picket duty, surrounding the transports, took the brunt of the attacks.
Sailors paid a heavy price out there in the ocean abyss.
From the Japanese viewpoint, it was a good trade: a plane and pilot for a ship and crew.
A regular dive bomber would have a good chance of being shot down, and would do less damage.
Most people don’t know that the losses of US Navy personnel during the campaign around Guadalcanal in mid-late 1942 were nearly 2.5 times greater than the losses among the ground troops, as it was a time when the US Navy was fighting the Imperial Japanese Navy at a disadvantage, or on par at best. The fighting was brutal, and during this longest campaign of WWII (which was also the first full scale air, land, and sea battle in history) the US Navy had 4,737 KIA or missing, and land/air forces had 1995 KIA.
The fighting at sea was barbaric and brutal, and the book by James Hornfischer “Neptune’s Inferno” describes it in detail better than any other. Carrier battles occurred over the horizon, and gunfire duels with modern naval artillery took place at ranges that approached those of sailing ships of old.
And over it all was the mercilessness of each fighting force for the other, underneath it all, was the fearful and deliberately unspoken, all too common predation of the man-eating sharks on the unfortunate survivors of sunken ships.
It was also the campaign that made the Sullivan Brothers a household name when they were all lost in the sinking of the USS Juno by a Japanese submarine.
The sea around Savo Island came to be known as “Iron Bottom Bay” because of the many warships sunk there. This poem below was written by Captain Walter Mahler, A Chaplain aboard one of the first ships to be sunk there:
IRON BOTTOM BAY
(By Capt. Walter Mahler, Chaplain on USS Astoria sunk August 9, 1942 in The Battle of Savo Island with 219 men killed)
********************************************
I stood on a wide and desolate shore
And the night was dismal and cold.
I watched the weary rise,
And the moon was a riband of gold.
Far off I heard the trumpet sound,
Calling the quick and the dead,
The long and rumbling roll of drums,
And the moon was a riband of red.
Dead sailors rose from out of the deep,
Nor looked not left or right,
But shoreward marched upon the sea,
And the moon was a riband of white.
A hundred ghosts stood on the shore
At the turn of the midnight flood,
They beckoned me with spectral hands,
And the moon was a riband of blood.
Slowly I walked to the waters edge,
And never once looked back
Till the waters swirled about my feet,
And the moon was a riband of black.
I woke alone on a desolate shore
From a dream not sound or sweet,
For there in the sands in the moonlight
Were the marks of phantom feet.
It’s understandable; there are no battlefield memorials, no marked graves, no poppies, no flags.
—
Other than Pearl Harbor, Hawaii & various WWII ship exhibits
An incredibly powerful poem.
“Trump can protect them.”
I disagree. If the left wants to get at them somehow either to defame them or worse, they can and will.
And, as good of a President as Trump was, and will be again, he has proven he cannot protect himself. He’s constantly being back stabbed or on the defense legally.
I don’t think any Seal is afraid.
Remember Trump bringing in the 4 women who were harassed by BJ just before a big debate? Do the same with the Seals. The target would be Obama not Biden. Biden like Hillary-it would be guilt by association.
Bring up Seal team 6-the ones who died.
Remember-Trump is preemptive. He doesn’t wait to react. That’s why we lose. Think Lee Atwater-lite.
There were more sailors killed at Okinawa than there were Marines or soldiers killed.
My uncle joined the Navy as a 17 year old in 1941 just days before Pearl Harbor. Went through the whole war in the Pacific. There were events that he either wouldn’t talk about or would say “Don’t ask me any more about that.”
Had two uncles on Okinawa; one Marine, one Army. Marine uncle pinned under a flipped over jeep (mine) and bayoneted in the throat while he was helpless ( he lived).
It’s personal for my family.
Understand your point though.
“And Osama? Didn’t happen.”
Fed through a wood chipper.
A terrible recounting of history. It was the USS Juneau, not 'Juno' and it was sunk by a torpedo from a Jap destroyer, not a sub.
You got me on a misspelling (and for that I am grateful) but the sinking of the USS Juneau was due to the actions of IJN sub I-26.
She was damaged in action by a Japanese destroyer and limping back to port and would have made it were it not for the I-26. Although she was heavily damaged, she was able to keep up sufficient speed.
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