Posted on 04/19/2018 11:46:39 AM PDT by Retain Mike
One week after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt began pressing the U.S. military to immediately strike the Japanese homeland. The desire to bolster morale became more urgent in light of rapid Japanese advances. These included victories in Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as sinking the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse.
Only improbable, audacious ideas warranted consideration, because submarines confirmed Japan placed picket boats at extreme carrier aircraft range. One idea even involved launching four engine heavy bombers from China or Outer Mongolia to strike Japan and fly on to Alaska. Captain Francis Low, a submariner, first broached to Admiral Ernest King the idea of flying Army Air Corps medium bombers from an aircraft carrier.
The generation that saved the world from a new dark ages. Thank you!
I was told one of my neighbors, growing up, was on the raid on the Norwegian heavy water plant.
He was recruited because he spoke fluent Norwegian.
I do not know if it was related, but a ski resort in the area was named Telemark.
The school printer at my grade school in the early ‘60s was one of Merril’s Marauders.
Never heard a bad word from him or talk about it. His son was a good friend, he told me. Worked in his print shop a bit, easiest guy to work for/with.
Gone of course now. Don’t think he could imagine the country as it is.
The Doolittle raid marked the long and strong recovery from the stock market great depression. Morale victory indeed.
We’ve got a B-29 pilot alive and kicking at my church. Just turned 100. Great man, great stories.
When I was working my way through college at a Sears appliance repair center in the mid 1970s, one of the fellow parts men had been a Marine infantryman in the invasion of Okinawa. When he found out that I had lived in Japan in the late 60s, he gave me a set of penpal letters he had received from a Japanese young man in the late 30s, before both of them ended up on opposite sides of the war in the Pacific. He had never hated the Japanese, but knew what was necessary to save the world from Axis tyranny.
He told a story once about the first Japanese captured by his platoon. After all of the bloodshed they had seen, the men screamed and hollered all sorts of ugly things they were going to do to the prisoner. Then one of them said, “C’mon, guys, someone give him a cigarette,” and immediately the tenor changed, and everyone wanted to help the evidently scared, starving Japanese.
Like Henry V’s men on St. Crispin’s Day, they could show their wounds, and men like me hold our manhood cheap. I often wish I could have been one of them.
A great story well worth another read.
Admiral Nimitz was not enthusiastic about the project. He wanted Enterprise and Hornet to Join Lexington and Yorktown in the South Pacific for what became the Battle of the Coral Sea. As events would show at Midway, Hornet's flight crews needed more training too.
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