Posted on 05/27/2019 9:55:58 AM PDT by rktman
And the night before, another set of Tin Cans turned Japanese tactics to their advantage, and hammered a major Japanese task force with torpedo attacks in Surigao Strait.
That was some tough fighting.
Taxman’s (tongue in cheek) Rule of the Sea: “Never get out of the sight of land if your ship is less than a thousand feet long!”
HST, I have spent time at sea on some “small boys,” and admire and respect tin can sailor’s sea legs and cast iron stomachs!
I was on this beauty until I was discharged in 1968...QM2 and lead navigator. I almost extended for a Med cruise the ship was so great...loved her.
USS Ault - DD698 (Back when Tin Cans looked like destroyers)
LOL! Probably looked just like 696, 699 and 732. Now the destroyers look like cruisers.
Yes...the super carriers can really move.
On my first Atlantic crossing on the Kennedy in 1976, we left at night IIRC, and I went to sleep. My berthing space was right under the wires back near the aft end of the ship.
I woke up and the ship was pounding. Take your fist and pound it rhythmically on a table 240 times a minute, and that was the frequency. My whole rack was shaking.
I put my clothes on and went back to the fantail...it wasn’t a rooster tail being raised, but it was a mountain of white water. The ship was really moving...as I looked out from the hangar bay, the water was just rushing by. I never knew how fast it would go, but that seemed nearly highway speed to me.
We used to lash plywood covers over the pilot house windows...in rough seas, waves would break over the short bow and knock out the windows.
“Neptune’s Inferno” was one of the best naval books I have ever read, and I have read quite a few.
Most people today have no idea of the absolute seaborne savagery that took place in the Solomon Islands in 1942.
For every marine or solider who died on land, three sailors died at sea. That was when, as lowbuck said, we were still learning to fight.
And the things that took place in the sea...heartbreaking to read. Back in the nineties, I got to spend several hours with one of the surviving officers of the Indianapolis sinking, and his reactions as he tried to describe some things to me, fifty years after the fact, have left a deep mark on me.
One of the things he said was, fifty years later, he could not say The Lord’s Prayer.
And just even telling me he couldn’t say The Lord’s Prayer turned his face crimson and caused him to choke up.
If there was anything that ever reflected to me in a meaningful way the horror of that experience, it was that. Fifty years later.
I’m a fan of Hornfischer. I have Neptune’s Inferno and Fleet at Flood Tide. I’ll be ordering Tin Can. Thanks.
I have never been able to imagine anything more bleak, hopeless and filled with a constant sense of terror than being lost at sea. We were just not meant for that place in the world. Giving up hope would be so tempting.
No collection of WWII Pacific books would
be complete without Shattered Sword. If
you haven’t read it already, please please do.
https://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Midway/dp/1574889249
USS George K. Mackenzie, DD 836
She was my home for 3 years, I was a stupid teenager and in retrospect I know I served with some of the Finest
One Storm in the North Arabian Sea I remember actually walking on the Bulkheads (walls) we were rolling so much.
I always loved being at Sea unless we were pulling into Olongapo, I loved that better.
If you want to read about a most amazing man in that respect, check out the story of Eddie Rickenbacker, well described in the book “The Aviators” which talks about Rickenbacker, Lindbergh, and Doolittle. (The whole book is great, one of my favorites, but the section about Rickenbacker is astonishing.)
Rickenbacker was an amazing man. Just astonishing. After becoming the leading American ace of WWI, being a car racer, starting a motor vehicle manufacturing company, buying and saving the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Where the Indianapolis 500 is run) he bought Eastern Airlines in 1938.
Just wow.
But those aren’t the most remarkable thing about him.
On February 26, 1941, he was a passenger on a Douglas DC-3 airliner that crashed just outside Atlanta, Georgia. (As the hands-on owner of Eastern Airlines, he flew all around the country dropping in at the terminals to see with his own eyes how things were running, this was one of those journeys)
Rickenbacker suffered grave injuries, being soaked in fuel, immobile, and trapped in the wreckage. He spent the entire night with his face pressed immovably against the back of the dead co-pilot, held there by a sharp spine of metal that had caved in his skull from behind.
Rickenbacker had a fractured skull, other head injuries, a shattered left elbow with a crushed nerve, a paralyzed left hand, several broken ribs, a crushed hip socket, a pelvis broken in two places, a severed nerve in his left hip, a broken left knee, and Rickenbacker’s left eyeball was also blown out of its socket and was dangling down on his cheek when they pulled him out the next morning.
In spite of his own critical wounds, Rickenbacker encouraged the other passengers, offered what consolation he could to those around him who were injured or dying, and guided the survivors who were still ambulatory to attempt to find help. The survivors were rescued after spending the night at the crash site. Rickenbacker barely survived. This was just the first time that the press announced his death while he was still alive.
He would spend the next year and a half recuperating and learning to walk with a cane.
Before he was fully healed in October 1942 (his accident above was in February 1941) the government asked him to take a trip to some Pacific airbases and talk with the men who were suffering morale problems. He was a tough guy, known for being able to tell successfully tell people to buck up and do their job, an unpopular task nobody wanted, but he accepted and wasn’t even healed yet from his accident.
On the way out to one of the islands, the B-17 they were on got lost, strayed 800 miles off course, ran out of fuel, and crashed before sending an SOS. They drifted for 24 days before they were found, all near death.
Eight crew survived and fit into two rafts, one large, one small. Their food and water ran out after three days.
To your statement about giving up, nearly everyone tried to, but...Rickenbacker simply would not let them. He badgered and harassed them, until they all hated him with a white hot burning passion, he was so nasty and irascible in his efforts to goad people into surviving.
And he succeeded.
Afterwards, one person said they developed the will to survive simply because they wanted to go on hating him. He was always known to be an abrasive and no-nonsense man, but he took it to a new level and saved these people.
It was also the second time in his life he was pronounced dead by the media, and a grieving nation was stunned to learn that, yet again...he was still alive when they were finally found at sea!!!
Thanks. That touches me deeply, even though I didn’t hear the conversation you had.
I did hear one of the best soliloquys ever given on screen — Robert Shaw in “Jaws”. “...sharks got the rest. I’ll never put on a lifejecket again.”
The Burke DDG’s are a thrill to drive, with gas turbines and controlled reversible pitch propellers. They kick up quite a rooster-tail and can stop in a hurry.
My father was on the USS Heermann DD532 during the Battle Off Samar.
Cuttnhorse,
We must be brothers. I served on PCFs in Vietnam.
Since I spoke VN fluently, I was always the American Liaison and only went out on VN boats.
One of the best books I’ve ever read describing the sacrifices our folks in uniform have made. Last stand of The Tin Can Sailors and With The Old Breed prettymuch lay it out. Ordinary men doing extraordinary things. We got some great people doing them now too.
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