Posted on 08/15/2015 4:24:13 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
No, no, no, no, no. Like this:
Wow. The NY Times with a positive article about America and it’s military(”Victory Made In The USA’’). How ‘bout that?
Thank you, Homer. Well done, Sir.
Thank God it was over.
The great tragedy of cataclysms such as World War II is that having suffered them, they make people yearn to create a better world.
The above link is to home movies a freeper’s dad of VJ day celebrations in Hawaii. The freeper dubbed in all the sound effects! Color even. A great look of the time.
Homer - Standing ovation. Your dedication to consistency and attention to detail in these posts is remarkable.
You warm my heart. I have striven for consistency all along, in the hopes that other virtues would follow and certain flaws be made less noticeable.
How's starting this war workin' for ya, huh?
Homer - Thanks so very much for all your efforts on this...I’ve followed this daily. I’ve always been a WWII history buff, but you day-to-day threads have made it a “real time” experience. Thank you for your dedication to this project over the last several years.
Well done, Homer. By far the most educational history lesson I’ve ever experienced. Thank-you!
Yep
Can’t say they don’t deserve much worse than they got
I certainly second that. It was granular, day-after-day, battle-after-battle, now victory-after-victory, gut-wrenching, exhilarating, and above all informative. In thinking about it, I don't suppose too many people, not just on Free Republic but anywhere, have ever been exposed to such persistent detail about any subject, much less one so profoundly important.
Homer, your vision in imagining this six-year series, and your superhuman effort in presenting it in such exquisite detail every single day, leaves us all in awe of you and distinctly in your debt. I still hope you'll let us demonstrate that.
Japan went to war to expand territory and ended up losing a lot of territory, lost Manchuria, Korea and others.
http://www.vf31.com/sorties/last_day.html
The Last Day
August 15, 1945 - The Last Day of the War
On their way to bomb Japanese airfields in the interior of Japan, 4 Hellcats from VF-31 from the USS Belleau Wood were flying with 4 Hellcats from VF-49 from the USS San Jacinto (CVL-30) when they came across four British torpedo bomber aircraft being attacked by a group of 15 Zeros. This was very unusual as there had not been much enemy fighter resistance in the last month of the war as there were very few aircraft and fewer pilots remaining with the Japanese forces.
The four fighters from VF-49 dropped down to engage the enemy aircraft while the pilots of VF-31 flew top cover. The pilots of VF-49 succeeded in downing 4 of the Zeros but were having difficulties from the other 11 so VF-31 dropped down and engaged the enemy aircraft and VF-49 flew top cover for a while. They switched back and forth until 12 of the enemy aircraft were shot down and the other 3 fled. Not one of the British torpedo planes or American fighter planes were lost or badly damaged in this engagement.
Lt (jg) Ed Toaspern: Is credited with 2 aerial victories
Lt. Jim Stewart: Is credited with 1 aerial victory
35 minutes after regrouping with the aircraft from VF-49 and heading once again for their assigned target, the division from VF-31 got word over the radio from the air officer aboard USS Belleau Wood to abort their mission and return to the carrier Belleau Wood as Japan had just surrendered and the war was over. All aircraft landed safely aboard.
This may very well have been the last fighter to fighter aerial engagement of the war against Japan.
Shortly after 1400 hours radar picked up a single unidentified contact closing on the fleet. Four divisions from VF-31 were flying CAP over the task force and were ordered to intercept. The aircraft was identified as Japanese “Judy” dive bomber and Admiral Halsey gave the order “To shoot down, not with hostility but with compassion”.
Ens. Clarence Moore fell in behind the Judy and with 2 short bursts from his F6F, set it on fire and it crashed into the ocean.
This was the last aerial engagement of the war against Japan.
http://netnebraska.org/basic-page/other/war-letters-victory-1945-okinawa
Captain Margaret Gaule, Omaha
August 15, 1945
My Darling Husband,
That Red Letter Day has finally come, and I’m so filled with happiness and thanksgiving. If only we could have been together on this great day. However, even though we were not together in person, we were in the thoughts of each other. My own husband I love you so much and from now every minute is lived in anticipation of that great day you and I will be together and then celebrate in our own way. Lucille and Marge went over to have a little cocktail in the nurses Red Hall but I don’t feel like that tonight. I just want to be as close as I can to you tonight and this is my only means. I’m so happy that it’s all over darling. I can’t help crying. We have so much to be thankful for and especially I.
Precious, I must get ready for bed because I have slept little today and I’m pretty tired. Lucy and Marge are still celebrating somewhere, but I wanted all my celebrating to be with you.
Good night my loved one. Tonight I go to sleep realizing it won’t be long until I will be able to go to sleep in your arms — my own darling husband. God grant it will be soon.
All my love,
Midge
http://amti.csis.org/august-1945-a-snapshot-of-american-maritime-strategy-in-the-pacific/
Michael Jonathan Green
When Japan surrendered 70 years ago this month, the United States stood supreme in the Pacific. Only the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy had surface combatants that could roam freely from the Indian Ocean to the East China Sea and these remained a fraction of the massive “Big Blue Fleet” the U.S. Navy had deployed. With the exception of Taiwan, parts of the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese archipelago and a smattering of isolated South Pacific atolls, the entire offshore island chain in the Western Pacific was under the control of the United States and its allies.
Continental Asia was another matter. U.S. and Commonwealth forces had advanced across Burma, but Manchuria and the northern part of the Korean peninsula were under the control of Soviet forces. The U.S. government would rush battle-hardened veterans from Okinawa to occupy the southern part of the Korean peninsula and leave the vast expanse from Mandalay to Hanoi under Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command (SEAC– which American officers derided as the “Save England’s Asian Colonies” command). In the next two decades this weak purchase on the mainland would cost over 100,000 American lives in Korea and Vietnam as policymakers debated how far to invest in the security of Continental Asia.
With respect to maritime Asia, however, there was little debate. As Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King told the press on July 24, 1943:
“…after this war, whether we are criticized for imperialism or not, we have got to take and run the Mandated Islands, and perhaps even the Solomons. We have got to dominate the Pacific.”[1]
King spoke for the entire naval establishment and the majority of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s senior advisors. After fighting a bloody island hopping campaign across the Central and Southwest Pacific, there was broad consensus that America’s post-war defense line had to lie on the offshore island chains and not Hawaii or the West Coast. As early as 1943, Navy Secretary Frank Knox ordered a review of which air and naval bases the United States would need in the Western Pacific after the war. The U.S. Army Air Force, which had used offshore islands to such devastating effect against Japan, also came to appreciate that opponents with strong air forces did not necessarily need a large navy to threaten U.S. interests in the Pacific if they had access to air bases on the islands. Roosevelt’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, had confided to General Joe Stilwell that after the war the United States must have strong bases in Formosa, the Philippines, “and anywhere we damn please.”[2] The President’s liaison to the Chiefs of staff, Admiral William Leahy, told the President that it was critical for the United States to hold all the islands taken in the Pacific as permanent bases and not to turn them over to the UN.[3] And in July 1945 Knox’s successor, James Forrestal explained in testimony before a joint session of the Senate and House Committees on Naval Affairs in July 1945, the United States had to seek naval superiority in pivotal areas, including “the waters contiguous to Japan and to the Philippines.”[4]
Roosevelt was an avid student of Alfred Thayer Mahan and a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and understood the inherent importance of the offshore island chain to the security of the Pacific and the United States itself. But FDR was also an anti-imperialist and a fervent believer in a new collective security order centered on the “Four Policemen” of Britain, China, Russia and the United States. He mused throughout the war that the offshore island chain could host bombers to keep an eye on Japan and maintain stability after the fighting stopped. The offshore islands were critical, he concurred, but within the context of collective security. To the dismay of key advisors, Roosevelt turned the Kuriles over to Stalin at Yalta and agreed to put the former German colonies in the South Pacific under UN Trusteeship as a way to prod the French and British to do the same with their former colonies. JCS planners, who had studied taking the Kuriles to bomb Japan, warned that the islands were “the obvious springboard of the most possible route of attack on us” by Soviet forces after the war, but they could not sway President Harry S. Truman from fulfilling Roosevelt’s plans in the final allied summit at Potsdam on 18 July 1945.[5]
Over the next five years, the Navy lost political momentum in the rush to demobilize after the war. By 1950 the Big Blue Fleet was reduced to a small fraction of its former strength, with only one carrier, two destroyer divisions, three submarines, and a pair of auxiliary ships.[6] Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously excluded Korea from the American defense line in his January 1950 National Press Club speech. That June, the North attacked the South. Truman’s first reaction on hearing the news, was to ask about the threat to Japan and the offshore island chain. The vision of offshore island control advanced by King, Knox, Forrestal, Hopkins and Leahy now became the centerpiece of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. And though rarely stated as such, remains the centerpiece today.
[1] Stoler, Allies and Adversaries, 144.
[2] John Paton Davies, China Hand: An Autobiography, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 151.
[3] Leahy, I Was There, 314.
[4] Forrestal testimony quoted in Davis, FDR, 159-160.
[5] “U.S. Position with Regard to General Soviet Intentions for Expansion,” July 6, 1945, file ABC 092 USSR (15 Nov 44), RG 165, NA, quoted in Marc Gallicchio, “The Kuriles Controversy: U.S. Diplomacy in the Soviet-Japan Border Dispute, 1941-1956”, Pacific Historical Review, 60, no. 1 (Feb., 1991), 80.
[6] Edward J. Marolda, Ready Seapower: A History of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, (Washington, DC: Naval History & Heritage Command, 2012), 20.
About Michael Green
http://www.armysignalocs.com/veteranssalultes/surrender_out_1.htm
Surrender On The Air
August 15-19, 1945 – United States Department of State Bulletin.
The following messages were sent to the Japanese Emperor, the Japanese Imperial Government, and the Japanese General Headquarters by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers:
[Aug. 15, 9:30 A.M.] – Outbound Traffic
I have been designated as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, the United States, the Republic of China, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and empowered to arrange directly with the Japanese authorities for the cessation of hostilities at the earliest practicable date.
It is desired that a radio station in the Tokyo area be officially designated for continuous use in handling radio communications between this headquarters and your headquarters. Your reply to this message should give all signs, frequencies, and station designations.
It is desired that the radio communications with my headquarters in Manila be handled in English text. Pending designation by you of a station in the Tokyo area for use as above indicated, stations JUM, repeat JUM, on frequency 13,705, repeat 13,705, kilocycles, will be used for this purpose; and WTA, repeat WTA, Manila, will reply on 15,965, repeat 15,965, kilocycles.
Upon receipt of this message acknowledge.
MACARTHUR
[Aug. 15, 9:52 A.M.] – Outbound Traffic
Pursuant to the acceptance of the terms of surrender of the Allied Powers by the Emperor of Japan, the Japanese Imperial Government, and the Japanese Imperial Headquarters, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers hereby directs the immediate cessation of hostilities by the Japanese forces. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers is to be notified at once of the effective date and hour of such cessation of hostilities, whereupon the Allied forces will be directed to cease hostilities.
The Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers further directs the Japanese Imperial Government to send to his headquarters at Manila, Philippine Islands, a competent representative empowered to receive in the name of the Emperor of Japan, the Japanese Imperial Government, and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters certain requirements for carrying into effect the terms of surrender. The above representative will present to the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers upon his arrival a document authenticated by the Emperor of Japan, empowering him to receive the requirements of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.
The representative will be accompanied by competent advisers representing the Japanese Army, the Japanese Navy, and Japanese Air Forces. The latter adviser will be one thoroughly familiar with airdrome facilities in the Tokyo area.
Procedure for transport of the above party under safe-conduct is prescribed as follows: The party will travel in a Japanese airplane to an airdrome on the island of Ie Shima, from which point they will be transported to Manila, Philippine Islands, in a United States airplane. They will be-returned to Japan in the same manner. The party will employ an unarmed airplane, type Zero, model 22, L2, D3.
Such airplane will be painted all white and will bear upon the side of its fuselage and the top and bottom of each wing green crosses easily recognizable at 500 yards. The airplane will be capable of in-flight voice communications, in English, on a frequency of 6,970 kilocycles.
The airplane will proceed to an airdrome on the island of Ie Shima, identified by two white crosses prominently displayed in the center of the runway. The exact date and hour this airplane will depart from Sata Misaki, on the southern tip of Kyushu, the route and altitude of the flight, and estimated time of arrival in Ie Shima will be broadcast six hours in advance, in English, from Tokyo on a frequency of 16,125 kilocycles. Acknowledgment by radio from this headquarters of the receipt of such broadcast is required prior to take-off of the airplane. Weather permitting, the airplane will depart from Sata Misaki between the hours of 0800 and 1100 Tokyo time on the seventeenth day of August 1945. In communications regarding this flight, the code designation “Bataan” will be employed.
The airplane will approach Ie Shima on able course of 180 degrees and circle landing field at 1,000 feet or below the cloud layer until joined by an escort of United States Army P-38’s which will lead it to able landing. Such escort may join the airplane prior to arrival at Ie Shima.
MACARTHUR
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