Yellow, green and pink rounds exploding.
Posted on 03/13/2019 8:31:12 AM PDT by Coronal
On July 1, 1942, the U.S.S. Wasp, an aircraft carrier holding 71 planes, 2,247 sailors and a journalist, sailed from San Diego to the western Pacific to join the battle against the Japanese. On board was a naval officer named Lt. Cmdr. John Joseph Shea. Two days before he left San Diego, Shea wrote his 5-year-old son a letter.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They probably de-emphasized gunnery because of the Lomng Lance.
Actually Jap naval fire control was mostly optical with some radar ranging. It wasn’t that bad, in fact their night vision stuff was state of the art for the time period. Engaging the Jap Navy at night was death sentence for the first 3 years of the war.
For a cruiser or destroyer, perhaps. But battleships exist to carry and fire their guns. I would imagine that gunnery expertise would be a top priority on a battleship. As I understand it one of the issues at Samar was that the Japanese overestimated the size and speed of their targets which would lead to errors in calculating their shots.
Wasp was a very modern looking little carrier. A shame she was lost and lost so early in the war. She just didn’t live long bit was so lightly equipped she was almost doomed from the outset.
I think that is a pretty solid favor!
Thing is, even later in the war, the IJN still had decent destroyer functionality of those that were surviving, but I think after the Solomon campaigns, they ran into a buzz saw and were whittled down to nothing by the end of the war.
I read a book a while back “Japanese Destroyer Captain” and his story reminded me of the German U-Boat situation once the allied began developing appropriate tactics with adequate equipment. All of his peers (the Captain) were killed off, and he was one of the few fortunate to survive the entire war.
His account of being skip bombed by American planes was hair-raising...
I’ve always read that a night action was a thing to avoid with the Japanese. I am sure they fired their torpedoes at night too.
Indeed they did.
I read that book, I think he said their sonar was ineffective above 12 knots. That was an issue for sure....
Thank you for posting this. As one with vivid memories of WWII these kind of reports really touch my heart. I remember the reports of the lost ships and lost warriors. Things that shaped the person I became. My mother might have packed the shells used on the Wasp. She packed shells for the big guns at Redstone Arsenal, and survived an explosion that brought the building down over her head. She crawled out, but suffered what we probably call Post Traumatic Stress for the rest of her life. I’m glad they found the Wasp and it is so interesting to see the pictures and read the letter to Jack.
Yellow, green and pink rounds exploding.
A seaman aboard the USS White Plains at Samar shouted “They’re shooting at us in Technicolor!”
We actually beat them and achieved victory in one of the early night engagements (The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942) with the American force under the command of Admiral Willis “Ching” Lee with the USS Washington as his flagship because it had the newest radar.
Admiral Lee aboard the USS Washington crippled the IJN Kirishima using (for the first time effectively) radar directed gunfire, hitting her with 9 16” shells and 40 5” shells, and she sank early in the morning.
It was a material victory and a tactical one as well, because their plans to bombard Henderson Field were thwarted.
Admiral Lee was an interesting guy...he won five Olympic gold medals a silver, and a bronze in various shooting events that were common then.
He was a mild looking man with spectacles, and was related the General Robert E. Lee.
He once built an electronic guillotine for his wardroom with a meat cleaver and a solenoid controlled by a remotely wired button, and they placed it in the overhead on a pipe the rats were known to frequent. They had contests to see who had the best reflexes and could kill the most rats with the device.
He was nicknamed “Ching” not because of his ancestry but because he enjoyed sailing in the Asiatic Fleet and spent most of his career there.
Unlike nearly everyone else to whom radar was a mystery and a nusiance (to many officers who pooh-poohed it) Lee understood the brand new technology, capabilities and actual construction and maintenance of the early radars better than any other officer or enlisted man.
He developed and practiced (when he could) radar guided gunnery as his ships made their way to Guadalcanal, and when he got his opportunity in night combat, he sank a Japanese battlewagon.
He died in of a heart attack just days before the Japanese surrender in 1945 while in a launch taking him back out to his flagship off the coast of Maine.
Pretty remarkable guy!!!
Maybe MH370 landed on it.
And we’ll find the two of them together.
LOL, ya think?????
That is almost comical, but...a good thing, because as screwed up as their upper rank officers often were, their destroyer teams had a lot of skill and extreme aggressiveness and tenacity.
That limitation probably saved a good number of our men (though we probably didn’t know it at the time)
Heh, I am telling you all this about Admiral Lee and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, but if you read “Destroyer Captain” you probably read “Neptune’s Inferno” too...
I have long thought that, if I could see one movie created, and they promised not to screw it up totally with political correctness and Hollywood stupidity...I would want to see a movie created about the Battle of Leyte Gulf...complete with Halsey taking the bait, Oldendorf crossing the “T”, the charge of the Little Boys, the helpless jeep carriers running for their lives to try and reach a rain squall...there is so much real drama in that.
They could do great things now that were not possible in making the movie with CGI and such, but...Hollywood would probably bollux it up...put women as captains of ships and have open homosexuals aboard.
On second thought...DON’T make that movie!
I liked “Little Ship, Big War: The Saga of DE343”. But I read it so long ago I hardly remember any of it.
Reading the letter from father to his 5 yo son, how prescient the wording is, to today.
“When you are a little bigger you will know why your daddy is not home so much any more. You know we have a big country and we have ideals as to how people should live and enjoy the riches of it and how each is born with equal rights to life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, there are some countries in the world where they don’t have these ideals, where a boy cannot grow up to be what he wants to be with no limits on his opportunities to be a great man, such as a great priest, statesman, doctor, soldier, business man etc.
It would make for a fantastic epic, but I don’t know if you could properly tell everything that needed to be told in a a two or even three hour film. There’s a lot of needed story setup to the Battle off Samar.
Makes you wonder how they lost so bad at Leyte Gulf with a weapon like that Long Lance
My grandfather was in that battle. His tin can fired off a bunch of torpedoes. They all missed according the the ship history I read.
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