Articles from 1945
“During the final days of the war, the Navy’s carrier aircraft concentrated on northern Honshu, inflicting heavy damage on industrial targets of Hamaishi on the ninth of August. One of the last blows struck, however, was directed at Wake Island, where the Japs had scored one of their earliest victories of this war.”
“Nine months and a day after she was commissioned, the pug-nosed little carrier Bismark Sea (CVE-95) was as much in the two-day-old battle for Iwo Jima as the Marines fighting for the island’s lower air strip. This was her third major campaign in less than four months. Her career was just beginning, and the crew was proud of calling her the Busy Bee. She was a happy ship.”
Happy or not, after two Kamikazes hit home, the ship sank in just two hours, taking 318 men with her. She claimed the dubious distinction of being the last American carrier to be lost in the war.
“One of the best kept secrets of the war was revealed by a recent Navy Department report that, on June 4, 1944, an escort carrier task group hounded a Nazi sub through the waters some 150 miles off the coast of French West Africa near Cape Blanco, forced it to the surface, boarded it, and took the Nazi over. The group then towed their prize, U-505, about 2,500 miles to Bermuda…”
Just as the Pershing M26 tank was deployed to the ETO during the closing weeks of that campaign, so too, was the Grumman 747 Tigercat deployed to the Pacific just weeks before the Japanese capitulation.
“If the Japs have a word for ‘duck,’ they’re probably using it plenty these days when they see the new TIGERCATS, that twin-engine fighter recently thrown into action in the Pacific. Termed F7F in Navy parlance, the latest Grumman battler to be given public recognition is one of those versatile designer’s dreams that can lug bombs, toss rockets, intercept cover bombers on long-range missions, fly night hawk expeditions and do everything else but have a baby for you… which is about all they haven’t been asked to do.”
“Radio Tokyo indicated inadvertently yesterday that out Superfort offensive aimed at the destruction of Japanese war production had attained a considerable measure of success.”
“From the start the naval Construction Battalions were unusual outfits, mostly because of the men in them and because theirs was a new kind of warfare… Every Seabee found himself doubling in various trades. It was thus the construction men developed their most important tools – improvisation, ingenuity and guts. Often parts, materials and equipment had to be manufactured on the spot in shops hastily thrown together from salvaged enemy materials and tools… But as the Seabee organization grew (from an original force of 3,300 to a peak of 247,155, of which 83 percent were overseas) and its activities increased, the battalions picked up plenty of know-how, enabling them to smooth out and speed up operations.”
Looking back from a point four months after VJ-Day, this anonymous journalist recalled the first six months of the Second World War, and how ill-prepared the U.S. Navy was to take on the two-ocean war.
Assorted well-campaigned swab-jockeys lounge-about and discuss their various experiences on both oceans.
Click here to read the observations of a general who fought both the Germans and Japanese.
“Another Now It Can Be Told story – one of the best kept secrets of the Pacific war – came out last month when it was revealed that a U.S. naval group had been operating with Chinese guerillas behind the Jap lines in China. Their combined efforts, the Navy disclosed, had been a vital factor in the smashing blows of the Pacific Fleet against Jap-held islands, the Jap Navy and, finally Japan itself.”
Throughout the course of World War II, there were three admirals who commanded to U.S. Atlantic Fleet: King, Ingersoll and Ingram. It was Admiral Jonas Ingram (1887 – 1952) who wrote the attached article about battle for the Atlantic:
“The Atlantic Fleet’s record speaks for itself. Since the declaration of war we have escorted 16,760 ships across the Atlantic. Of these, less than a score were sunk in convoy…We know definitely that we sunk 126 U-boats…”
Click here to read a related article.
Here is an interesting article from World War Two that goes into some detail explaining what is involved when a lieutenant colonel in an infantry regiment presents his plan of attack on a German town that is heavily defended. We hear him as he addresses the junior officers who will do the heavy lifting, and we get a sense of their concerns. Few reporters have ever paid any attention to this aspect of an assault.
“New Yorkers sat in stunned silence yesterday as they watched the incontrovertible proof of the unbelievable – the U.S. Army Signal Corps motion pictures of Nazi horror camps and charnel houses… People came out of the theaters shaking their heads, or gazing blankly off into space, or cursing them under their breaths. They produced mixed reactions – a mixture of horror, of grief, of anger, of hate.”
“We should reduce Germany to dust. The Germans can’t be trusted, and we have to watch Argentina and Spain.”
“Seven million New Yorkers let down their hair last night in the wildest, loudest, gayest, drunkest kissingest, hell-for-leather celebration the big town has ever seen.”
Click here to read about VE-Day in New York City…
During the August of 1945, C.C. Beall (1892 – 1970), popular commercial illustrator of the Forties, was dispatched by Collier’s to illustrate the surrender of the Imperial Japanese Empire on the decks of the battleship Missouri – and to draw-up whatever else caught his fancy on mainland Japan. Much of his account concerns his search for food and suitable lodgings.
“German prisoners of war are not coddled at the Fort Dix camp. The PWs are not mistreated, but neither is any kindness shown them. The officers supervising them are not cruel or lenient; they adhere strictly to the letter of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners.”
PM reporter Jack Shafer knew all this to have been true, because he went to Fort Dix and saw for himself.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) had much to say as to how the German people could come to terms with all the dreadful acts that were committed in their name during the previous 12 years.
“[The German] will try frantically to rehabilitate himself in the face of the world’s accusations and hate – but that is not the right way. The only right way is his unconditional acknowledgement of guilt… German penitence must come from within.”
Click here to read Jung’s thoughts on Hitler.
April 14, 1945 is remembered as President Truman’s first day as Chief Executive. FDR died on the twelfth and he was sworn-in shortly after that. Just what he did with the rest of that day, much less on the thirteenth, is a mystery to me – but, let it be known here and now that his first day exercising his Presidential Authority was on the fourteenth. He met with the brass caps from the Pentagon, planned speeches, spoke on the telephone with numerous New Deal big-wigs and shook many, many hands. All involved were in agreement that it was the busiest day in his life.
“Down the line, since [Truman] voted in the Senate in 1935 for U.S. participation in the World Court, his positions on foreign relations and international policy have been consistently on the side of FDR and for the fight against fascism.”
