My wife was not thrilled that I gave it away after all that work!
Here's what it looked like back then:
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God bless you for doing so.
Very few people know about that battle off Samar, and the heroic efforts not only of the Taffy Jeep carriers, but particularly the destroyers who convinced the Japanese Admiral that he had run into the main force of cruisers and battleships...and so he turned away when he was on the cusp of a great victory at the anchorage for the invasion force of the Philippines.
It was too late for it to have changed the outcome of the war...but a lot of Americans would have died, and it would have delayed things.
Very few people appreciate how hard fought the war in the Pacific was, and how, early on, what a near thing it was.
My Dad, who was a combat office in the navy in the PTO in the war, made sure his sons were not among those who did not understand.
> “Very few people appreciate how hard fought the war in the Pacific was...”
I probably wouldn’t either except that my father died on Guam. I was just a toddler at the time, but later read his and my mother’s letters, leading up to the telegram from the Adjutant General informing her that he’d been killed in action — there had been a delay of several weeks in which she desperately wrote him, begging him to write and reassure her that he was ok — “The Secretary of War desires me to express their regret that your husband [name] was killed in action on Thursday six July in Guam...” Many spouses received a message like that. There were 416,800 American military deaths in World War II.
My wife was not thrilled that I gave it away after all that work!
Here's what it looked like back then:
" style="width:304px;height:228px;">