Hi Guys,
Today marks the 75th anniversary of a turning point in our WW II history. Seventy-Five years ago we initiated the Battle of Midway. We were the underdog with fewer aircraft carriers, no battleships, and fewer experienced pilots. Yet, with audacity and heroic persistence we won a decisive victory that changed the war in the Pacific.
Here is a Link that documents several elements of the story:
http://midway75.orgEnjoy. I salute the men who fought so bravely, especially the few surviving members of our band of heroes.
Best Regards
Comments
The next spring, after Solomons success, FDR sent out orders to get the guy. My Japan-born father was a codebreaker on Pearl, and intercepting / decrypting the intel on Yamamoto's 4/43 flight was, with the subsequent shootdown, the high point of his WWII experience. Yamamoto actually was killed by gunfire in the air, not the crash.
Those were long-gone days of clarity and mostly pulling together.
BTW check out the Nimitz Greybook at the US Naval War College. Truly a superb "insiders view" of things out there back then. The PDFs are rather large scans of typed hard-copy from the day.
Per the website:
"The Command Summary of Fleet Admiral (FADM) Chester W. Nimitz was compiled by the War Plans Section of the Pacific Command Headquarters in Hawaii during World War II. It contains daily estimates of the situation, command decisions, and running summaries of communications from December 7, 1941 to August 31, 1945.
Naval War College Historian Douglas Smith avers that it is "the most authoritative source on the Pacific War available anywhere."
Find it @ https://usnwcarchive.org/items/show/849
This past weekend I enjoyed watching CSPAN2 (my favorite weekend TV-watch) presenting videos from the Hampton Roads Naval Museum commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Midway. If you can navigate the chaos of the c-span
website(s) huge library of videos from past programs you can view them
-- some presentations better than others, but I was particularly
interested in
https://www.c-span.org/video/?429286-3/us-navy-pilots-battle-midway
https://www.c-span.org/video/?429286-5/codebreaking-battle-midway
A decade ago I found on y/t a short video on the Pearl codebreakers, and one passing still photo from it showed my father (not at all a higher-up) conferring with a colleague at a desk, from the side. Unidentified. I cannot find it anymore, phooey.
He wrote his own father that his being BiJ and fluent in Japanese (less reading/writing than otherwise) was a big advantage mostly in going through newly arrived diaries of dead Jpn soldiers, which smelled when bloody.
(His father, my grandfather, a Jpn missionary, was a much bigger deal as to rare fluency, landing on Guadalcanal in his late 50s and getting intel from PoWs by being nice to them. Ojisan sure did have strong feeling about the rise of fascism / militarism in his beloved Japan.)
Thanks for your reply -- especially the comment about the photo of your Dad. Seems like it SHOULD still exist somewhere.... anyone have suggestions for searching??
Clearly your family had unique experience in an area where US had few with language and culture skills. All of my uncles served in varying assignments, but none in Pacific except oldest uncle (already a nearly-overage banker when drafted -- served in CBI (China-Burma-India) mostly liason with local officials. Japanese language skills must have been truly prized at that time.
My own family connection with WW2 is almost entirely in Europe -- youngest Uncle jumped on D-Day - blinded by shrapnel & landed in treetop, captured & later nearly escaped from German train bombed & strafed en route to German POW camp -- long story I learned only decades later. "Greatest generation" is a hard term to justify, but I still think it fits.
I would be only too happy to have them be the "LAST and greatest" of our citizen combatants/
I made a note of the codebreaking film and the possible still of my father, but have placed it somewhere to be found later
Yeah, right about fluency being prized. Jpn missionaries, a few academics, and perhaps some businesspeople were the only citizens fluent in Japanese when Pearl Harbor was attacked. My grandfather was so lucky to be on sabbatical. My father was here just out of college. My website about ojisan is gone (comcast) and also recently deleted from the wayback archive, so I must resurrect it somehow. Meanwhile, this has some of his influence:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/06/truth-extraction/303973/
When he went to WDC after the attack, at 56 or whatever it was, they thought he wanted to be a chaplain. He has to force them to recognize the utility of his fluency, and after he repeatedly insisted he wanted to interrogate young fanatic PoWs and knew how to get good intel, the USMC made him a major on the spot and shipped him out. Less arthritic than me for sure.
Grandpa and his wife returned to Jpn postwar to resume their mission work (social work) for another decade or more. He also did postwar assessments, bombing and whatnot.
I am halfway through a novel based on his saga (he lived to 97), and am making the injured pilot in the famous tent photo
https://globalecco.org/documents/10180/611256/ctx2-3-Kristofferson-2.png/d0b3050c-bbad-4f2c-85c5-15d41e2ad19e?t=1359158232000?t=1359158232000?t=1359158232000?t=1359158232000
a kid whom he had sports-coached 15-20y earlier ....
Thank you all for the interesting and informative exchange. I learned plenty.
I greatly appreciate BobC's reference to "The Man in the High Castle " series. I liked the original series and was not aware that a season two had been made. It's some very inventive storytelling. I too will join the binge-watching crowd. That deserves a double thank you.
Best Wishes