Midway 2019 #1 at the Box Office!

Box Office Mojo ^ | 11-10-2019 | Box Office Mojo

[who_would_fardels_bear]

From the previews, the CGI looked no better than the fanciful stuff from that silly Battleship movie from a few years ago.

Do the aliens arrive in time to save the Americans from the Japanese?

[rlmorel]

Thank you for saying so, that was very generous of you.

As you can surmise, this is an interesting subject for me, and it does seem that everyone knows about Coral Sea, Midway, and even the Marianas Turkey Shoot, but...they to go blank when you mention Leyte Gulf.

I have 4 books that directly deal with the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and probably a half dozen or more that spend significant time on it, and they all discuss the message from Pearl Harbor to Halsey with the words “The world wonders” and Halsey’s reaction to that unfortunate choice of words by a sailor who it was later determined had been reading “The Charge Of The Light Brigade” at the time, and inserted “the world wonders” instead of nonsensical padding that was put both at the beginning and end of messages meant to make the job of the enemy trying to decode it more difficult.

The radioman sending it to Halsey began the message with the phrase “Turkey trots to water” as padding and ended it with “The world wonders”.

Pretty amazing. That choice of words, inserted unwittingly in a way as to appear to be part of the message, at that critical point in time. It is no surprise that Halsey blew his stack, but...he had to spend the rest of his life explaining that he wasn’t wrong in taking the bait offered by the IJN.

One book I read explained it in a way that hit home to me. In 1944, nearly every man who read had knowledge of “The Charge Of The Light Brigade”, had read it in school or college, and it had real meaning to many of them. So the meaning of “The World Wonders” was not lost on Halsey.

Additionally, in the kind of thing that really makes you wonder...the day the message was sent was the 90th anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Battle of Balaclava. You just cannot make that up.

Tennyson’s poem had the last stanza as the British calvary charged to their certain deaths due to unclear instructions or outright stupidity. out of 600+ men in the charge against the wrong hill (a heavily defended one) and out of those 600+ men, 110 were killed and 161 wounded...pretty high losses.

All because someone made a mistake. So the stanza:

Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder’d

Really had to hit home to those men in destroyers off Samar, who, due to some stupidity or mistake somewhere, now found themselves in the position of having to charge their thin skinned destroyers at battleships, to what they had to think was hopeless odds, but they did it just the same.

This Veteran’s Day, I salute all of them.

[rlmorel]

Ahhhh...the last battleship-to-battleship encounter in history. You do have a touchstone to the very pulse of history.

[rlmorel]

It is an odd thing indeed that sailors do develop an attachment to a ship, a big hunk of metal, but I understand it.

It is natural that ships are referred to as “she” and never, ever “he”.

I have always felt that way about ships myself, I understand that emotion...which must indeed be more concentrated and pronounced when you spend years on a vessel as they did during WWII.

Especially when you are in danger.

[napscoordinator]

Too funny. Sees like your in the same boat with all the husbands.

[Calif Conservative]

Midway 2019 is #1 at the box office so feel free to be left out

[hanamizu]

Jeremy Clarkson did a very good program about the raid on Saint-Nazaire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s&index=15&list=PL0BCBABCD4184DE91

[rlmorel]

That is great...thank you for that endorsement. You might like this image my wife's family had. Her mother worked at a drug store that had photo developing back in the late Forties/early Fifties, and people always brought in things to be developed and never came back for them.

They either threw them out, or if they saw something they liked, they could take them. These images were from a sailor off of a carrier that came into the Boston Navy Yard (possibly the USS Leyte?) who had dropped negatives off to be developed and never picked them up:

The first one is a surrender ceremony, but probably on a lesser ship somewhere else on the Japanese mainland, I would guess.

[Spktyr]

Yup. That’s one of the ones I was thinking of.

[Spktyr]

The Commando interviews were *post* war. As someone else pointed out, some of the last interviews were contained in a Jeremy Clarkson documentary. You can see their opinions yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXusKM5uX0s

I type corrected on the specific action Patton took, but the fact remains that there is still no excuse for that behavior. I think Abrams was a better general - and Patton himself acknowledged Abrams as at least his equal.

[Spktyr]

No TBD Devastators survived the 1960s intact, there are none in museums and the only possibly restorable ones are wrecks resting on the ocean floor.

What do you propose to film in their place in a movie?

[prov1813man]

Thanks much

[Spktyr]

If you have these in higher resolution, there’s a number of historians that would want copies sent to them.

Second from last has USS Capps, DD-550, a Fletcher class destroyer in the background.

The carrier in the last picture may be CVE-74, USS Nehenta Bay, a Casablanca class escort carrier. The air crash picture tends to confirm that - the FM-2 Wildcat with tail number 20 has tail art unique to the Nehenta Bay and the VC-8 composite squadron:

http://www.pmcn.de/English/USN%20Markings%20IV/Nehenta%20Bay%20IV.jpg

Can’t be sure if that was just accident footage or not, but during the battle for Okinawa, the Nehenta Bay survived a kamikaze attack after having been heavily damaged in Typhoon Cobra. More about her here:

https://www.hullnumber.com/CVE-74
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/october/battling-pacifics-most-deadly-force

I suspect the storm pic may be from Typhoon Cobra and all but the surrender were on Nehenta Bay.

[Bull Snipe]

Thanks

[rlmorel]

I watched the video you linked to, that was nicely done, his occasional drollness somehow appropriate to the material. I stumbled across his work within the last year or so, and have watched a few. He gets some interesting pictures that I have never seen before, and I have seen a good number.

As for those pictures, I scanned them at 300 dpi and still have the originals somewhere. We speculate that someone on the ship probably found some rolls of undeveloped film in some obscure drawer and was curious. Or, the Leyte had been in Boston nearly a year being overhauled and had a significant fire in the yard that killed a few dozen men (my best friend’s father in law was on her at the time. They had a dedication and a plaque placement in September 2001 just a week or so after 9/11, and that was a strange feeling to be in Boston and not have a single plane in the sky.)

Anyway, we speculated they may have just been negatives of existing pictures already disseminated, and some yard worker found them and wanted to get images of his own. I had never seen them before, although the flaming Hellcat does closely resemble a more famous picture (I think)

That is always a fun thing-finding undeveloped film years after the fact. I found several rolls from my Navy days a couple of decades after I got out, and it was a lot of fun to get that peek back into the past.

If you run into anyone interested in higher resolution images, I would be happy to find a way to make them available.

[Spktyr]

Google Image Search does *not* turn up any other copies of what you posted, so they may be unique.

The US Naval History And Heritage Command would be interested in them for starters.

https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/numerical-list-of-images/nhhc-series/naval-subjects-collection/l45—us-navy-ships/181-200/l45-196-03-01-uss-nehenta-bay—cve-74-.html

Various destroyer societies and museum ships would be interested in the Capps picture, this might be a good starting point:

http://www.destroyers.org/index.html

These guys would want your pictures as well:

http://ecsaa.org/CVE-Class

[Spktyr]

Drachinifel’s recent one on the USS Franklin was at least as good and features some very rare footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tJh-XkVyYA

[rlmorel]

That was one of the first of Drachinifel’s works that I saw, and stumbled across it in my search for the famous picture of Father O’Callahan tending to the injured, dying, and dead on the USS Franklin, which I thought was one of the most powerful pictures of the war.

I enjoyed it. There is a quirky way he explains things that I find entertaining (as in your post “They got Bored” when discussing the action off Samar)

Thanks again for providing those links. One of the things I enjoy about FR is the exposure I get to people who have a different but overlapping range of knowledge on subjects I am interested in. It allows me an easy and entertaining way to expand my circle of knowledge, so...thanks.

[aragorn]

“I don’t fault Charlie Brown for assuming Lucy is going to pull that football away.”

“Because she does pull it away nearly every time.”

“...nearly every time”....WHAT? NEARLY??

See It's Magic, Charlie Brown.

The only time I ever saw (well, sort of) Charlie Brown get to kick the football.

[BuffaloJack]

My dad was an ensign aboard the destroyer USS Heermann, DD532, part of Taffy 3, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. USS Heermann sank the Japanese Heavy Cruiser Chikuma after pounding it out with the cruiser using only its smaller 5 inch guns.