Bloody but forgotten WWII battle still haunts soldiers

http://www.wnct.com/ ^ | 5/28/18

[BBell]

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — William Roy Dover's memory of the World War II battle is as sharp as it was 75 years ago, even though it's been long forgotten by most everyone else.

His first sergeant rousted him from his pup tent around 2 a.m. when word came the Japanese were attacking and had maybe even gotten behind the American front line, on a desolate, unforgiving slab of an occupied island in the North Pacific.

"He was shouting, 'Get up! Get out!'" Dover said.

Dover and most of the American soldiers rushed to an embankment on what became known as Engineer Hill, the last gasp of the Japanese during the Battle of Attu , fought 75 years ago this month on Attu Island in Alaska's Aleutian chain.

"I had two friends that were too slow to get out," the 95-year-old Alabama farmer recalled. "They both got bayonetted in their pup tents."

Joseph Sasser, then a skinny 20-year-old from Cartharge, Mississippi, also found himself perched against the berm on Engineer Hill when a captain with a rifle took up a position about 10 feet (3 meters) away.

"I noticed about after 30 minutes or so, he was awfully quiet," Sasser said. "We checked to see if he had a pulse and if he was alive, and he was not.

"We didn't even know he had been shot," said Sasser, also 95.

American forces reclaimed remote Attu Island on May 30, 1943, after a 19-day campaign that is known as World War II's forgotten battle. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, waged in dense fog and winds of up to 120 mph (193 kph).

The battle for the Aleutian island was one of the deadliest in the Pacific in terms of the percentage of troops killed.

[lapsus calami]

 

 

It was largely mistrusted by many commanders then in battle, and Admiral Willis ‘Ching’ Lee was one of the first commanders who had a full understanding of radar, what it was good for, and how to employ it. He nearly single-handedly brought radar guided gunfire into modern naval warfare and once we saw what it could do, we rapidly learned how to employ it.

 

Admiral Lee was a groundbreaker in that regard for sure - he successfully integrated radar into battle tactics while onboard his flaghip USS Washington and reduced the IJN battleship Kirishima into a burning wreck in a matter of minutes during the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal - one of only two battleship-on-battleship shootouts of the war I know of.

 

 

[rlmorel]

Good analysis.

The Japanese in all branches were known for overly intricate, overly coordinated and optimistically timed campaigns...to their detriment.

I have always thought that the Japanese did very well in light of their odd weakness in military doctrine. I have always attributed any of their later successes (after their initial ones) to their unbelievable toughness, stubbornness, and industriousness.

[rlmorel]

I think he Admiral Lee, in that one engagement, brought nearly the entire fleet onboard with respect to the advantages of radar-guided naval gunfire.

Pretty impressive.

Have you read “Neptune’s Inferno”?

[laplata]

Good, logical analysis. Thanks.

[BB62]

It’s Hickam Field, not Hickman Field.

[lapsus calami]

 

 

Yeah, they had the ongoing fantasy of getting that one big battle that was going to be the knockout punch of all knockout punches. A 'mother-of-all-battles' if you will. They even built their strategy around depending on such an event. The reality was that they weren’t much in the position to give any after Midway and we worked to try and avoid being on the receiving end of one. Even so, I can think of several instances where they got the drop on us bad – but then got cold feet, chickened and ran instead of following through and finishing the job. They came so close a time or two and never even knew it.

 

One of the wackier – to me the wackiest – strategic views by their high command, to their collective detriment, was the expectation that in our drive towards Japan we were going to attack each and every island in their defense perimeter, in the order we encountered them. Yes, believe it or not, that was an official strategic doctrine. They expected us to slam into island after island one at a time chock full of dug-in and prepared troops waiting to deal out a nasty drubbing at each stop. They concluded that would simplify their allocation of resources, only having to build up and concentrate troops and assets at locations and on a timetable that they could anticipate and control. When we split our approaches and commenced the “island hop” strategy, it threw Imperial Headquarters into disarray – they had no long-range planning to cope with such a scenario.

 

Headquarters then fell into a pattern of waffling around on what to do, which drove their field commanders bonkers - waffling that typically led to total destruction of their garrisons. There had been no real effort to harden up positions further inside their perimeter since there was no expectation that they would have to be defended. Consequently we achieved complete strategic surprise at a number of locations and caught the Japs utterly flat-footed. This is where the Japanese “toughness, stubbornness, and industriousness” came into play. There may have been plans for the defense of some locales, but no actual work done, no infrastructure in place. Some commanders managed to organize a defense in a pinch and give a good account of themselves in using what they had at hand, though typically at our arrivals they dropped what they were doing and headed for the hills, surrendered outright or launched a first and only Banzai charge with small arms because it was all the combat capability they had.

 

 

[lapsus calami]

 

 

I think he Admiral Lee, in that one engagement, brought nearly the entire fleet onboard with respect to the advantages of radar-guided naval gunfire.

 

Lee had MK8 radar well calibrated with the guns on his battleships, which could track and fire upon a fast moving target at 32,000+ yards - and straddle it on the first salvo. Just imagine what those battlewagons could do with the latest & greatest modern radar.

 

 

Have you read “Neptune’s Inferno”?

 

I did soon after it came out – it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know – but, it is a well researched work for the uninitiated. Very good book, and I highly recommend it.

 

 

[rlmorel]

I was not there, so it has been difficult for me to grasp the time. I thought the author did a great job of explaining that time frame to the reader.

I did spend time in a navy family, and did a tour at sea myself, but I have to consider myself one of those “uninitiated”, especially since I never had to enter a burning compartment (except for damage control training). I consider myself to be very well informed about these things, but I learned a lot from that book.

It boggled my mind to imagine the carnage. So many lives lost in engagements measured in minutes...the description of the way a salvo from a battleship could be seen at night glowing red, disappearing into the clouds, then reappearing from the clouds downrange in their arc...it really helped me to visualize that.

[rlmorel]

I was out on the water about 20-25 miles north of Boston today, and you could see the city skyline from there.

That was what popped into my mind: “The USS New Jersey could hit that from here!”

It was astonishing to consider.

[Mears]

“I was out on the water about 20-25 miles north of Boston today, and you could see the city skyline from there.”

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Lucky you,it was gorgeous day.

.

.

[rlmorel]

Stunningly beautiful, the coast, the water, and the sky.

We took a boat trip around Cape Ann out of Gloucester up the coast, and then south through the Annisquam River back into Gloucester...took about two and a half hours!

What a day! Good to be alive...:)

[Mears]

Sounds incredible——I haven’t been to Cape Ann in quite a while but was close by a couple of years ago when we all had brunch at The Wenham Tea House.

A beautiful area——we all live in western Boston suburbs but prefer the North Shore to the South Shore-——a source of many an argument in Massachusetts. :-)

.

.

[rlmorel]

Here is where we went...it was a lot of fun...we chatted the whole way with a couple from Pennsylvania who were visiting for a week:

For what it is worth, I like the North Shore better as well...:)

[lapsus calami]

 

 

I wish more people would pick up a book, study the Pacific theatre more. What’s rather troubling is the lack of awareness of what truly went on. Seems too many people think the war in the Pacific consisted of Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a couple of naval battles. Way, way off the mark – not even close. There were dozens of invasions, dozens of pitched battles over land and water. We had to spool up momentum to move in, dominate every nautical mile of the sea and air out there to disrupt enemy lines of communication in support of the overall strategy – and keep that momentum up, not let it fall off. We had to land on and take all sorts of widespot-in-the-ocean places most people have never even heard of to ‘base’ our way into Empire held territory. It was a long, nasty slog that many remain unaware of to this day. The distances involved were daunting, and the efforts to overcome them in order to take the war to the Japanese even more so, making the struggle in Europe look simple in comparison.

 

 

[lapsus calami]

 

 

The age of missile technology is too familiar, too mundane – there’s just something about the raw power of old tech large caliber gunnery that grabs you. As we’re seeing, as time goes on the defense capability against missiles is tightening up. It’s getting better and better. But I’m not sure what if anything could be done to actively interdict a trio of more or less 2,000lb each (configuration depending on mission) projectiles coming at you in feet per second and not miles per hour. Guess it would be Doom on you, in a spectacular manner.

 

 

[rlmorel]

100% true.

There was an interesting book out many years ago that you can't even find anymore it seems, by Vincent Bugliosi called "And The Sea Will Tell". A fascinating true murder story that played out back in the Seventies in a deserted WWII era American dot in the ocean airfield in the Pacific called Palmyra. The story is really unusual about two boats with two couples that just happened to be there at that same time, and something happened between them resulting in one couple disappearing and the other couple taking their boat and returning to the USA.

Thing was, it made me think of how full the Pacific Ocean must be of little dots of land where American boys and men did terribly boring jobs, seemingly forgotten by the war, occasionally having a plane land and refuel, drop supplies off, etc. Their contribution largely forgotten by history.

---

One battle in particular that I believe is under appreciated by history is The Battle of Leyte Gulf.

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".