Posted on 05/29/2021 4:02:42 PM PDT by Jacquerie
Where our Sailors Rest.
“If you ever want to sleep with a blonde again, you had better shoot down these bastards as soon as they come up” – a destroyer captain motivates his exhausted crew shortly before a kamikaze attack. The sea-battle toll for Okinawa that ended on June 21st 1945 was 36 U.S. warships sunk and 368 damaged. Almost 5,000 sailors were KIA and another 5,000 wounded.
War naturally conjures images of courageous infantrymen. Gettysburg, Flanders Fields and not the Coral Sea or Leyte Gulf.
Too often forgotten are the heroic Navy, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine sailors felled at sea. It’s understandable; there are no battlefield memorials, no marked graves, no poppies, no flags. Presidents and dignitaries visit Normandy and not Midway or Iron Bottom Sound. Few are the photo memoirs of engineering room slaughter-by-steam, of those who inhaled fire, of those blown overboard, of those who survived the battle only to die of burns, thirst, or sharks.
Hoses washed the remains of many off their ships. Some had proper burials. Did boot camp recruits know their Navy-issue hammocks did double duty as burial shrouds? I don’t know, but should your Memorial Day weekend find you on an Atlantic, Pacific, or Gulf of Mexico beach, you are graveside. Take time to say a few words of thanks.
2 1/2 MINUTE VIDEO: THE STOLEN 2020 ELECTION
https://www.brighteon.com/839346d6-da5d-48e0-9737-5a5fda8a4e4d
I worked at Lake Junaluska summer camp in 1987. The cook I worked for was on a Garbage Scow at Okinawa. He still had nightmares.
Submarine Triton, SS-201. Lost. Distant cousin. Maybe they will find it one day.
Thanks for posting this. I thought you might like this, written in 1942 by :
IRON BOTTOM BAY
(By Capt. Walter Mahler, Chaplain on USS Astoria sunk August 9, 1942 in The Battle of Savo Island with 219 men killed)
********************************************
I stood on a wide and desolate shore
And the night was dismal and cold.
I watched the weary rise,
And the moon was a riband of gold.
Far off I heard the trumpet sound,
Calling the quick and the dead,
The long and rumbling roll of drums,
And the moon was a riband of red.
Dead sailors rose from out of the deep,
Nor looked not left or right,
But shoreward marched upon the sea,
And the moon was a riband of white.
A hundred ghosts stood on the shore
At the turn of the midnight flood,
They beckoned me with spectral hands,
And the moon was a riband of blood.
Slowly I walked to the waters edge,
And never once looked back
Till the waters swirled about my feet,
And the moon was a riband of black.
I woke alone on a desolate shore
From a dream not sound or sweet,
For there in the sands in the moonlight
Were the marks of phantom feet.
Burial at sea.
The world does not understand how many were buried at sea.
Almighty Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8zMkYwnq8
People tend to downplay the contributions of the Navy in many ways, but they paid their price in blood as well.
During the Battle of Guadalcanal lasting largely from August through December 1942 three to four times as many sailors died in the battles at sea than Marines or Army killed on land.
Similarly, my mind's eye avoids ghoulish thinking of the 100,000 or so Allied and German sailors who perished in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Neptune’s Inferno?
y’can’t get it in any other way .... good on you !
Here’s an example of an Avenger gunner buried at sea, his aircraft serving also as his coffin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMWz10jaK0g
There’s a book called “Iron Coffins” its about the German U-boat service. I met the author at a book signing way back when I was in high school. By war’s end, 28,000 out of 39,000 German sailors had disappeared beneath the waves.
Indeed. It is an evocative poem.
It is hard for me to imagine the bloodshed from my comfortable chair.
I calculated once on Iwo Jima that a Marine or Corpsman was killed every 7.8 minutes for 37 days (on average)
Never mind Tarawa that had a man killed every 4.5 minutes for three days on average.
Both are averages, and don’t convey that huge numbers of men were being slaughtered in far shorter periods of time.
Hard to imagine.
I will remember them always, not just on Memorial Day.
Yes. That was one of the most powerful books on WWII naval warfare ever written, and that poem was featured in it.
I’ve known several Cold War-era naval veterans whose captains had “gone swimming” when their ships were sunk by kamikazes.
An additional one recalled a story about his own ship, a Sumner-class destroyer that served off Okinawa. As I remember it, his ship arrived two hours early to relieve another destroyer on picket duty, and it was the last assignment for the other ship before it was due to rotate home, so the other ship got to depart early. After the relief, the other ship was hit by kamikazes and sunk.
Thousands upon thousands were lost in the Pacific and thousands more in the Atlantic. If your ship was part of a convoy and sunk in the Atlantic, the rest were not to slow down to pick up survivors. If you were close enough to shore for a PBY to reach you, you might be picked up later. If you didn’t die of exposure.
Thousands upon thousands were lost in the Pacific and thousands more in the Atlantic. If your ship was part of a convoy and sunk in the Atlantic, the rest were not to slow down to pick up survivors. If you were close enough to shore for a PBY to reach you, you might be picked up later. If you didn’t die of exposure.
I have added Neptune’s Inferno to my collection. I served onboard an LST during three Vietnam campaigns. In reading the book, the author gave great descriptions of how about any part of my home could reach out and horribly kill me at any moment if the enemy got lucky.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.