I simply can’t imagine going toe to toe with the japanese navy at almost point blank range.
Guns, planes, shrapnel, blown apart bodies, sinking ships...I can’t imagine the horror.
No wonder his hair turned white..
Yep, the Kamikaze, and if the ship sank they had to deal with sharks and if they survived that they risked getting picked up by the Japanese and tortured if not outright killed. The thing is I don’t know what happened with him as he never ever ever talked about his service, it was too much I guess, so God knows what he went through. Same with my Grandad John Lumsden who was Scottish and served in WW1 as a pipe major for the Queens own Cameron highlanders, he never ever talked about what he went through and I lived in the same house as him for 20 years when he moved to the USA. He tried to first join when he was 14 to get away from his father who was an abusive alcoholic and then they finally took him at 16. The only thing I know about what happened is his friend lost half his foot from trench foot from flooded trenches. We visited him in Scotland in the 1960s and he told me first hand. I still have his bagpipes and even the same straight razor, leather and brush he used to shave with and this stuff is from 1915
One of the best books on this subject that I have read is “Neptune’s Inferno” by James D. Hornfischer about the Naval battles around the Solomon Islands between August and November 1942.
The American and Japanese Navies were fighting each other tooth and nail from a position of relative parity, and while it is easy to look at this time in retrospect and think the end result was a done deal, it was anything but that.
The savagery was astonishing.
Ships passing inadvertently between two other ships hurling shells at each other at point blank range, and crew seeing the shells pass between the stacks, masts, and rigging.
Destroyers passing 400 yards abeam of Japanese battleships at night going in opposite directions, the American destroyer pumping five inch rounds from every available gun into the superstructure of the Japanese battleship, and the crew could see the impacts immediately after firing, and the metal glowing cherry red from the fires they started inside.
American crews, in the silence before a battle before the rounds began firing, being suddenly illuminated by the searing searchlights of a Japanese warship, and the illogical, but common feeling of men being caught on deck in that searchlight beam, that somehow, hiding behind a locker to get out of the beam of light made them feel...safer.
One of the participants said that the fight was like “a barroom brawl after the lights had been shot out.”
At longer ranges during those night actions, seeing the glowing eight inch shells, a full volley of nine, ascending like a flock of birds, disappearing into the bottom of the clouds, then reappearing under the clouds near the horizon, and the flashes and glow of rounds that hit.
Of seeing the radar reflection of an enemy (or friendly) vessel being hit, and actually seeing the radar registration flicker and shudder under the blows.
I have read a lot of books on this particular campaign, as it really was the first coordinated air, land, and sea battle in history, and fought with such tenacity on both sides.
Remarkable book.