It gave me goosebumps when I saw this:
Posted on 05/08/2018 4:22:18 PM PDT by Jacquerie
World War II was less than six months old when the American public, already stunned by the debacles at Pearl Harbor and Guam, faced one of its darkest moments. Thousands of miles across the Pacific, the American commander in the Philippines, Maj. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, surrendered to the Japanese.
But the tides of war often turn dramatically. Within 72 hours, American ships, planes, and sheer guts would turn gloom and despair into optimism and hope in a little-known portion of the South Pacific. The naval encounter in the Coral Sea, the lustrous waters bordering Australia’s northeast coast, would knock the Japanese back on their heels and give both the American public and its military cause to celebrate.
The Japanese steamed into the Coral Sea with every reason to believe that another success lay before them. They had triumphed everywhere in the Pacific since December 7, 1941, when they had administered a crushing blow to ill-prepared American naval units at Pearl Harbor. What could possibly halt them now?
“Call Coral Sea what you will,” wrote Samuel Elliot Morison, “it was an indispensable preliminary to the great victory of Midway.” That in itself made the Battle of the Coral Sea a signal chapter in American military history.
(Excerpt) Read more at warfarehistorynetwork.com ...
It reduced the number of Jap carriers by two, available for Midway.
Today is VE day.
IMO Coral Sea was the true turning point of the Pacific War.
The Pearl Harbor strike force was composed of the carriers Shokaku, Zuikaku, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu & Hiryu.
At Coral Sea the Shokaku took two 1,000 lb bombs from Yorktown’s dive bombers and the Zuikaku had her air group decimated and neither were available for Midway a month later.
If the Shokaku & Zuikaku had been at Midway I don’t see the US getting the victory there; a 6 to 3 Japanese advantage in carriers would have been too much for the US forces to overcome.
God preserve and watch over all the brave kids who died there...
The Navy s*** on him and he was never given the recognition that was due him
The DEs & DDs of Taffy 3 flung themselves on the larger Japanese capital ships like magnificent rabid Chihuahuas.
It gave me goosebumps when I saw this:
Great book. Amazing battle. I have always thought that if I could ever have one movie made, and have it done well, it would a three hour movie called “The Battle of Leyte Gulf” with the finest state of the art CGI, true to the detail.
It would have everything in it.
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”.
One of the best books I have read in years on this subject was “Shattered Sword” which told the Japanese side of the Battle of Midway in greater detail, and you saw the horrible flaws in the designs of their ships that crippled their damage control ability. It is no wonder their ships fared so badly.
I will always remember John Wayne’s line in the movie In Harms Way. “A fast ship going in harms way” I think of that every time I think about Leyete Gulf. Also Southern force crossing the tee would be another great scene in a modern movie. God knows we paid our dues in the sea around Guadalcanal and Savo Island.
Halsey should have been court martialed after Leyte.
It would be a great movie indeed.
“At the time, we were fighting the same conservative isolationists we have right here on Free Republic now”
You’re forgetting that American Communists opposed the war because they wanted to see Britain and France suborned to communism. Only when Hitler attacked the USSR did the CPUSA decide to support the war effort.
Also, by the time of this battle in the Coral Sea almost all Americans had got behind the war effort due to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Regarding the planned Japanese invasion of Australia:
Declassified documents reveal that the Japs intended to starve every single person on that continent to death by giving them rice that had been denuded of its nutrients.
That was their plan.
They wrote it down.
In the diary, according to the newspaper, General Eisenhower in early 1942 described Adm. Ernest J. King, commander of the United States fleet as World War II began, as an “arbitrary, stubborn type” and a “mental bully.” One way to help win the war, General Eisenhower is reported to have written, was “to get someone to shoot King.”The crisis the US and Britain faced was a critical shortage of destroyers. Adm. King was fixated on the critical needs in the Pacific, which was quite understandable but also left US shipping to the tender mercies of Operation Drumbeat. Hundreds of freighters were sunk by U-boats in the first year of US involvement in WWII. King was reluctant to learn ASW from the Royal Navy, even tho that was where the Allies’ ASW experience resided.
An A-6 Intruder bombardier/navigator shipmate of mine did a couple of WestPac cruises in the early 1980s.
I remember him saying that at an Australian liberty port the American sailors behaved themselves and got a warm reception from the Aussies.
His squadron hosted a dinner and party at a hotel which was attended by plenty of young ladies.
One of the gals thanked him for the Battle of the Coral Sea.
Who’s “we?” Do you have FDR in your pocket?History shows that FDR was right to want to prepare for entry into WWII. But the reality was that before Pearl Harbor, entry into WWII polled 80% against. WWI wasn’t all that much more fun than Vietnam. Nobody wanted a repeat; even Hitler did not want that. And he did not repeat WWI in France, because his blitzkrieg worked.
Stalin did not want that; he allied himself with Hitler to avoid fighting Germany again. Chamberlain did not want that, and he was cheered for announcing “peace in our time” based on Hitler’s promises. France did not want that; even after Hitler’s September, 1939 invasion (with Stalin) of Poland, and the Anglo-French declaration of war, neither France nor Britain attacked Germany (resulting in the “sitzkrieg” or “phony war” up to Hitler’s blitzkrieg of France in May 1940).
After Pearl Harbor, opposition to fighting essentially evaporated. FDR foolishly tried to run a congressional race tarring Republican “isolationists,” but those Republican Congressmen had represented their constituents. They had represented their constituents in their opposition to war before Pearl Harbor, and they represented their constituents after Pearl Harbor in their support for the war effort. Consequently FDR’s attack on Republican Congressmen fell flat.
Rightly so; for the Australians that battle was no joke.
I think it was the first naval battle in history where the contending fleets never saw each other.
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