My late Dad (regular Army) related how he was assigned to the Aleutians after the “clean-up” was over... He also would have been with the Japanese mainland invasion force had the A-bomb not curtailed the war.
God rest his soul and those of all the brave men & women in the Greatest Generation who defended our nation...
My Dad, who will be 90 in March, was two weeks from finishing his tour with the Navy. What could be finer? He was a boilerman on the USS San Francisco, a heavy cruiser in Pearl for a major refit. His engines were taken apart and covered two docks and he was just coasting until he was shipped home, just in time for Christmas. Someone else could put the things back together. After a celebratory Saturday night, he was eating pancakes for breakfast when the first call went out that their ship was under enemy fire. Now this was Sunday morning and he was wearing his last pair of clean dress white shorts. His first thought upon hearing the news was that he was about to screw up his shorts and he would have to finish his tour in long pants. He does admit that that was a VERY fleeting thought, as the call came to get on deck to avoid the torpedos, as the boys on deck were hurrying to get below decks to escape the strafing. Despite the mental picture, Dad assures me that it was anything but comical.
To compound the problem, there was not a single working gun on the deck as they were all in the shops for the refit. The men were reduced to shooting with sidearms and rifles. I'm told that they were not too effective against speeding planes, but they did what they could.
The rest of the story is that Dad's ship was never hit at Pearl Harbor, his engines were put together and back in service in 48 hours, and the USS San Francisco went on to fight in some of the biggest battles in the South Pacific. Dad made it through alright, but he lost a lot of friends, and he didn't eat pancakes again until 1964.