Posted on 11/15/2010 8:08:42 PM PST by rlmorel
I was at my in-laws some time ago, and they brought out a bunch of boxes with images in them. We were looking over the family pictures, and I saw this small stack wrapped in brown paper. When I opened it, I found prints of the six images below. When I asked my mother-in-law where they came from, she said that she had worked at a drugstore in East Boston as a teenager in the mid to late forties. People brought film in to be developed all the time, and never came back to pick it up. They held onto some of them for years before they threw them out. She said she grabbed them with a bunch of other pictures as they were being thrown in the trash during an long-needed cleanup at the store. These were prints from what were probably original negatives I would guess.
What I found most interesting was the surrender scene. All this time I had it, I just assumed it was another angle from the Missouri Surrender ceremony, but when you really look at it, it isn't. There are no civilians, the weather is wrong and the ship looks older than the Missouri. Has anyone ever seen any of these images? Comments? I am very well versed on WWII history particularly in the Pacific Theater, and I don't recall ever seeing these pictures in any books I have ever read.
Especially before helicopters were common. That is why it’s so rare today, helicopters are a safer way to handle personnel transfers.
LOL...I tried the same thing. I will say, I have indeed seen it before somewhere.
Thanks for posting. Very cool.
Nothing else was ever close.
thanks for the ping! And WOW to the detective work in this great thread! Since there weren’t many scenes of formal surrender by the Japanese, because they fought until incapacitated or killed, the best guess is, the surrender scene was due to the overall national surrender announced by Emperor Hirohito, thus the scene was somewhere such as Okinawa where the Japanese were still fighting at the end.
Awesome!, Thanks for sharing these.
Funny, I have had these pictures for a few years, and while cleaning the other day, I came across them and took a closer look at them.
Interesting stuff, indeed.
Folks, this is the epitome of the digital world working as it should. Think of what this process would have been like just 25 years ago.
Then, if I had these photos and was curious about them, there would be a lot of phone calls, letters, visits to libraries, etc. A long process.
Not that the phone calls, library research and so on aren’t good, they are.
This is just much more efficient. Like having a group brainstorm, each of us with access to data that we can access and analyze, and collaborate on. Theories are advanced and discarded.
It is as if instead of having one person with a large hammer working on breaking up a boulder, there were dozens working at it with chisels.
I find this fascinating.
I asked someone from Missouri about the battleship used for that ceremony and they said remember who was President at the time.
You know, it is strange. I just looked at the fourth picture down, of the plane smashing into the others.
There is a guy with his back to the camera in the catwalk, looking up.
As I considered how dangerous that area was, with huge pieces of torn metal flying in all directions, I saw for a split second in my mind, just what that one twisted piece of metal traveling at that speed could do to a human body.
For an instant when I realized that, I felt as if I were the guy with his back to the camera. And I could feel, if only for a fraction of a second, that black terror that would make you dive into the smallest corner you could find and try to compress your body into it to avoid the shards of metal.
I only felt a pang of that terror, a flash of it so small that it came and went before I realized it. But I felt it.
I cannot imagine what the guy in the picture must have felt.
If you are made of Nomex, and dont need oxygen you might live. Otherwise he gave his life for the world I grew up in
LOL, I bet they do.
I had to pull the photo and check that side to side with yours. The wakes are VERY similar, but not exact and I assume the same boat in the same ocean would make a similar wake. But there are fewer people on deck in the stock photo. Very likely the same boat, but not a rotated version of this photo.
Neato thread, thanks for sharing.
They'd have probably have opened up to those who went through similar things, but for the rest of us, nunna our bidness.
U.S.S. Nehenta Bay was assigned to Task Force 44, the Northern Honshu & Hokkaido Surrender Force, under the command of Vice Admiral Jack Fletcher, Commander North Pacific (COMNORPAC). The task force arrived at Ominato Guard District in Mutsu Bay, Honshu on 7 September 1945, and U.S.S. Panamint AGC-17 met a Japanese delegation offshore on September 8th to prepare for the entry of the U.S.S. Panamint and the task force through the minefields and into into the Japanese 5th Fleet anchorage and naval base at Ominato Naval Base. The ceremony for the surrender of Honshu and Hokkaido Islands occurred on the deck of the U.S.S. Panamint on September 9th.
Awesome. Thank you very much.
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