Posted on 08/05/2022 6:51:05 PM PDT by Az Joe
According to me
I thought “The Pacific” was well done also. That and “Band of Brothers” are two portrayals I admired.
Generation Kill
OP Restrepo
So true. That battle is so unknown to many Americans. And I think at that part of the war, it was taking a toll on Halsey. It is pretty obvious in retrospect-he was only I think maybe 62 or 63 at the time, but that was a hard 62 or 63. One of the lessons of that war was that combat commanders were too old when we started, and they wore out. I think that happened to him in 1944.
The scale of the battle was huge. The stakes were high. The sub-plots were astounding.
Halsey, itching for a fight, taking the bait, and through a common clerical error which threw gasoline on the fire, ends up to his dying days fighting what he viewed as slander by people who questioned his actions, all under the shadow of the words “The world wonders”.
On the other side, almost simultaneously, the Davids of the US Navy in Taffy3 against the Goliaths of the Imperial Japanese Navy and their battleships, darting in, really, the unbelievable parallel to “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.
The destroyers of Taffy 3 with bones in their teeth sailed directly at the Japanese battlewagons, their five inch guns like the sabres of the Light Brigade being flashed in the air, they “Volley’d and thunder’d” like hooves, as the superstructures of the battleships flashed with impacts. They sailed under full steam to what many of them, like the calvary in Tennyson’s poem, assumed was going to be their certain death...”Someone had blunder’d”.
Halsey, in full pursuit to the north, gets the communication from his boss who is trying to discreetly ask what Halsey was up to without ruffling his feathers, ending with Halsey losing it on the bridge of the New Jersey and throwing his hat to the floor in white hot anger and shame as “All the world wonder’d” in Hawaii what was going on.
You could not make this up.
And then, Typhoon Cobra just a month or two later.
With the way they could use computer graphics to recreate that, with the real, unadulterated story line from history, that would be quite the production.
“The Battle of Leyte Gulf”. I heard Bill Whittle propose a movie production of it someday. I would love to see it.
The Pacific definitely made the European Theater look pale in comparison. At least in Europe you didn’t have to deal with the extremes in weather save for winter in the Ardennes. But I would take that over the heat and the bugs in the Pacific.
You’re right about the Marines. Pure hell they went through.
Sad about the two GIs assigned to your Dad’s outfit.
Many WW II vets who served with Patton in Sicily said people did not realize it but Patton was likely to have been suffering from Combat Fatigue himself when he smacked the two GI’s.
I was always astonished at many of the Marines who went through that Hell on Peleliu with those awful temperatures up to 115 degrees, were the same Marines fighting in 30 below zero temperatures in Chosin just a few short years later.
Damn. Those poor men. They must have wondered what shitty straw in life they drew.
The actor’s name escapes me right now but he was fling to Catalina Island to see his family and his plane crashed in front of them all.
I’ve seen “Twelve O’Clock High” many times and never get tired of it.
I have heard that Patton probably suffered long term damage (CTE) from the kick to the head he took by a horse while playing polo some years earlier. He was so concussed, he sailed his family in a sailboat from California to Hawaii a short time after it happened, and had no memory of how he got there.
Amazing they weren’t lost at sea.
Well said about the sadness. In Harm’s Way is one of my favorites
Thanks for sharing that. God bless them all.
Black Hawk aDown
Lone Survivor....
The Dam Busters
Sink the Bismark
P4L
The Dam Busters
Sink the Bismark
There was a coach at my high school. You’d see him drink a cup of coffee, now and then. A different coach told us that he never are at school, and only enough at home to keep him healthy. The smells from the War in Europe made it so he could not enjoy the smell of cooking meat.
Company13 and Stalingrad
I memember reading that somewhere.
Another bit of Patton trivia: As you know, he loved polo and played as much as he possibly could. About the middle of 1940, he quit playing polo because he knew we were going to get in the biggest war we’d ever fight and he didn’t want to risk getting hurt and not being able to fight in it.
1. Ben Hur
2. 12 O’Clock High
3. Midway
4. Patton
5. The Sand Pebbles
6. In Harm’s Way
7. Space Seed. Original Star Trek
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