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I've always been fascinated with the Guadalcanal story. My next door neighbor served on that island in 1942. He was one of the reasons I enlisted in the Marine Corps years later. I can just envision those young Marines with their antiquated '03 rifles and abandoned by the Navy hunkered down and hearing the noise and seeing the gun flashes from the ships slugging it out during the Battle of Savo Island.
One of the primary reasons we landed on Guadalcanal was a patrol report from a PBY Catalina that the Japanese were building an airfield. At that time during the early years Australia was a not to be lost asset to our forces. If the airfield was completed that Japanese could have achieved air supremacy over Northern Australia and the vital shipping lanes to and from that country.
I've always thought that Guadalcanal was the most epic campaign fought by the United States in World War II. It was a shoestring operation, one that could have gone terribly wrong. Yet relatively few know much about it.
I've always been fascinated with the Guadalcanal story. My next door neighbor served on that island in 1942. He was one of the reasons I enlisted in the Marine Corps years later. I can just envision those young Marines with their antiquated '03 rifles and abandoned by the Navy hunkered down and hearing the noise and seeing the gun flashes from the ships slugging it out during the Battle of Savo Island.
One of the primary reasons we landed on Guadalcanal was a patrol report from a PBY Catalina that the Japanese were building an airfield. At that time during the early years Australia was a not to be lost asset to our forces. If the airfield was completed that Japanese could have achieved air supremacy over Northern Australia and the vital shipping lanes to and from that country.
As with the U.S. Navy and the U.S.S. Washington finally turning the tide in the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (see post 19, and as at Midway), American victory at Guadalcanal on land was a matter of luck rewarding uncommon determination and bravery.
I've always thought that Guadalcanal was the most epic campaign fought by the United States in World War II. It was a shoestring operation, one that could have gone terribly wrong. Yet relatively few know much about it.
Actually, I think Guadalcanal is one of the best known battles of World War II with many books and several movies. There even was a multi-year TV series about Guadalcanal -- "Black Sheep Squadron."
"Guadalcanal Diary" may be the most famous book of World War II.
As with most World War II battles, I would agree that few persons take the time to read the histories of the battles. Regarding Guadalcanal, this especially applies to the fascinating naval battles, which involved several major surface actions, unusual in World War II.
Actually, I think Guadalcanal is one of the best known battles of World War II with many books and several movies. There even was a multi-year TV series about Guadalcanal -- "Black Sheep Squadron."
"Guadalcanal Diary" may be the most famous book of World War II.
As with most World War II battles, I would agree that few persons take the time to read the histories of the battles. Regarding Guadalcanal, this especially applies to the fascinating naval battles, which involved several major surface actions, unusual in World War II.
I think people know the name, but don't know the specifics they do say the Battle of the Bulge or Normandy. I mean, if you mention Savo Island or Cape Esperance, et al, it just doesn't resonate the way St. Mere Eglise or Bastogne or Anzio would. I suppose we could pump out a survey to know for sure. It think it's the same reason HBO's Band of Brothers is much better known than The Pacific. There's a blind spot in our historical imagination.
And that's kind of a shame because Guadalcanal was a sprawling bar fight of a campaign, one where courage, tenacity, and sheer dumb luck made a victory out of what was a very near-run thing.
I think people know the name, but don't know the specifics they do say the Battle of the Bulge or Normandy. I mean, if you mention Savo Island or Cape Esperance, et al, it just doesn't resonate the way St. Mere Eglise or Bastogne or Anzio would.
Actually, I don't think most persons know any more about the Normandy campaign than they saw in "The Longest Day." Viewers of "Guadalcanal Diary" probably have a better picture of the land battle at Guadalcanal than "The Longest Day" presents of the Normandy campaign. Having seen "The Longest Day," most persons think there were no guns found by the Rangers at Point du Hoc; in reality, a Ranger patrol found the guns in a nearby field and spiked them.
Persons who think they know about the Battle for Omaha Beach are typically oblivious of the key role played by U.S. Navy destroyers, another omission from "The Longest Day," and many accounts of the D-Day landings. You didn't see this in "The Longest Day," or "Saving Private Ryan:"
<<This was the moment, historian Ambrose says, that Eisenhower had feared the most. Nearly 5,000 Americans were ashore, cut off from reinforcements, unable to retreat--hostages as much as invaders. It was the moment that Rommel had anticipated the most. The Americans were caught half on the beach and half off, wounded and bewildered.
Offshore, Allied battleships and cruisers were helpless. They were too big to get close enough to give their guns the precision to kill Germans without killing GIs. Even destroyers were under orders to stand down until fire control spotters could make it to shore. Skippers watched in angry frustration as the Germans slaughtered American infantrymen on the sand. Finally, one of them had had enough.
Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Ramey, known in the Navy as Rebel, took it upon himself to charge the beach regardless. Ambrose says that Rebel Ramey steamed his destroyer, the McCook, close enough to see for himself that there were no Americans on a portion of the bluff near the exit draw leading to Vierville. He opened up with his 5-inch guns, blasted one German pillbox off the bluff and blew up another.
It was another victory for American flexibility and initiative. At 9:50 a.m., an admiral shouted into his ship-to-ship radio: "Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can't have any more of that!"
Every destroyer off Omaha responded. Skippers risked running aground to fire point-blank at targets of opportunity on the bluff.
Ramey had fired 975 rounds against the bluff. Other skippers fired 500 rounds, some as many as 1,120. "This destroyer action against shore batteries," naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison says, "afforded the troops the only artillery support they had during most of D-day." What the Navy had done, Ambrose says, was to give the men on Omaha a fighting chance.>>
Historian Stephen Ambrose, as evidenced by the above article, popularized the key role of U.S. Navy destroyers in the capture of Omaha Beach.
<<The situation was this. By mid-morning small groups of soldiers had begun making headway up the cliffs and had succeeded in taking out some strategic gun-emplacements. Slowly, at various points along the beach, the movement forward had begun. But there were still many places where the men were hopelessly pinned down and demoralized by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. No artillery had reached the beach, few tanks had arrived in working order and there were no working radios to help direct fire from the larger ships. It was at this time that the skippers of several destroyers-"tin cans"-seeing the catastrophic predicament of the men on the beach, decided to seize the moment.
The first to do this was Lt. Commander Ralph Ramey, the captain of the USS McCook. He sailed into the western sector-the section that had been assigned to the inexperienced 29th Division and that had been hit very hard in the first landings-to within several hundred yards of the beach and began firing with his five-inch guns at whatever he could see. His salvos were effective in destroying dug-in cliff positions, two artillery positions, and some pill-boxes. When other destroyer captains saw this they joined the McCook, guiding themselves by fathometer to within inches of becoming grounded-sitting ducks-and thus exposing their ships and men to heavy, directed artillery fire from behind the beach. Even from four or five hundred yards it was still difficult to spot well-camouflaged gun emplacements but determined gunners found ways to do so. Another destroyer that played an important role at this time was the USS Frankford. Its gunnery officer, Lt. Owen Keeler, writes: "A tank sitting at the water's edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a five-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party."
In addition to the McCook and the Frankford there were the USS Carmick and the USS Satterlee that deserve special mention for the initiative and courage they showed at Omaha, and probably others as well. More than destroying German positions to a significant degree, the close presence of these ships gave immeasurable moral support to the isolated men on the beach. These feelings could not have been expressed better than by James Knight, an Army engineer who landed at H-hour and who wrote a letter to the crew of the Frankford forty-five years after D-Day. "... at about 10:00 or 10:30 a destroyer loomed out of the sea...headed straight towards me...my first thought was that she had struck a mine...and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached. But suddenly she swerved to the right with all her guns blazing away." Over the years Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer without success until 1989. In his letter he wrote: "...nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your ‘cruise.' Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat beyond.">>
<<When Frankford, with Captain Harry Sanders aboard, closed the beach about 0900 things began to happen. All destroyers were ordered to the beach to help break through the defenses. This was the hour of crisis. Satterlee was picking off enemy gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc.1 McCook reported that she knocked one enemy gun off the edge of the cliff, and that another "flew up in the air."2 Vierville was taken by 1100.
At the eastern end of Omaha Beach Frankford, Doyle, and Emmons were hitting hard at three exits while Baldwin blasted away at German guns near Port-en-Bessin. Baldwin was hit twice by light artillery, with no casualties. At 1043 McCook reported picking up a radio message saying that American troops were advancing. Harding was leading their way, dropping salvos up the draw toward Colleville. By 1600 St. Laurent-sur-Mer was occupied by 29th Division troops. Colleville was in a vice, set up by 1st Division troops approaching from two draws. The Germans here surrendered the next morning.
How this team of destroyers arrived at this particular place in history, and made the landings at Omaha Beach succeed, is the story to be told.>>
E.g., how many persons know about "Operation Cobra?" It was the first use of carpet bombing by medium and heavy bombers and it allowed the Americans, including Patton's Third Army, to break out from their Normandy beachhead. See post 19 here.
Actually, I don't think most persons know any more about the Normandy campaign than they saw in "The Longest Day." Viewers of "Guadalcanal Diary" probably have a better picture of the land battle at Guadalcanal than "The Longest Day" presents of the Normandy campaign. Having seen "The Longest Day," most persons think there were no guns found by the Rangers at Point du Hoc; in reality, a Ranger patrol found the guns in a nearby field and spiked them.
Persons who think they know about the Battle for Omaha Beach are typically oblivious of the key role played by U.S. Navy destroyers, another omission from "The Longest Day," and many accounts of the D-Day landings. You didn't see this in "The Longest Day," or "Saving Private Ryan:"
<<This was the moment, historian Ambrose says, that Eisenhower had feared the most. Nearly 5,000 Americans were ashore, cut off from reinforcements, unable to retreat--hostages as much as invaders. It was the moment that Rommel had anticipated the most. The Americans were caught half on the beach and half off, wounded and bewildered.
Offshore, Allied battleships and cruisers were helpless. They were too big to get close enough to give their guns the precision to kill Germans without killing GIs. Even destroyers were under orders to stand down until fire control spotters could make it to shore. Skippers watched in angry frustration as the Germans slaughtered American infantrymen on the sand. Finally, one of them had had enough.
Lt. Cmdr. Ralph Ramey, known in the Navy as Rebel, took it upon himself to charge the beach regardless. Ambrose says that Rebel Ramey steamed his destroyer, the McCook, close enough to see for himself that there were no Americans on a portion of the bluff near the exit draw leading to Vierville. He opened up with his 5-inch guns, blasted one German pillbox off the bluff and blew up another.
It was another victory for American flexibility and initiative. At 9:50 a.m., an admiral shouted into his ship-to-ship radio: "Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can't have any more of that!"
Every destroyer off Omaha responded. Skippers risked running aground to fire point-blank at targets of opportunity on the bluff.
Ramey had fired 975 rounds against the bluff. Other skippers fired 500 rounds, some as many as 1,120. "This destroyer action against shore batteries," naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison says, "afforded the troops the only artillery support they had during most of D-day." What the Navy had done, Ambrose says, was to give the men on Omaha a fighting chance.>>
Historian Stephen Ambrose, as evidenced by the above article, popularized the key role of U.S. Navy destroyers in the capture of Omaha Beach.
<<The situation was this. By mid-morning small groups of soldiers had begun making headway up the cliffs and had succeeded in taking out some strategic gun-emplacements. Slowly, at various points along the beach, the movement forward had begun. But there were still many places where the men were hopelessly pinned down and demoralized by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire. No artillery had reached the beach, few tanks had arrived in working order and there were no working radios to help direct fire from the larger ships. It was at this time that the skippers of several destroyers-"tin cans"-seeing the catastrophic predicament of the men on the beach, decided to seize the moment.
The first to do this was Lt. Commander Ralph Ramey, the captain of the USS McCook. He sailed into the western sector-the section that had been assigned to the inexperienced 29th Division and that had been hit very hard in the first landings-to within several hundred yards of the beach and began firing with his five-inch guns at whatever he could see. His salvos were effective in destroying dug-in cliff positions, two artillery positions, and some pill-boxes. When other destroyer captains saw this they joined the McCook, guiding themselves by fathometer to within inches of becoming grounded-sitting ducks-and thus exposing their ships and men to heavy, directed artillery fire from behind the beach. Even from four or five hundred yards it was still difficult to spot well-camouflaged gun emplacements but determined gunners found ways to do so. Another destroyer that played an important role at this time was the USS Frankford. Its gunnery officer, Lt. Owen Keeler, writes: "A tank sitting at the water's edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a five-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party."
In addition to the McCook and the Frankford there were the USS Carmick and the USS Satterlee that deserve special mention for the initiative and courage they showed at Omaha, and probably others as well. More than destroying German positions to a significant degree, the close presence of these ships gave immeasurable moral support to the isolated men on the beach. These feelings could not have been expressed better than by James Knight, an Army engineer who landed at H-hour and who wrote a letter to the crew of the Frankford forty-five years after D-Day. "... at about 10:00 or 10:30 a destroyer loomed out of the sea...headed straight towards me...my first thought was that she had struck a mine...and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached. But suddenly she swerved to the right with all her guns blazing away." Over the years Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer without success until 1989. In his letter he wrote: "...nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your ‘cruise.' Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat beyond.">>
<<When Frankford, with Captain Harry Sanders aboard, closed the beach about 0900 things began to happen. All destroyers were ordered to the beach to help break through the defenses. This was the hour of crisis. Satterlee was picking off enemy gun emplacements at Pointe du Hoc.1 McCook reported that she knocked one enemy gun off the edge of the cliff, and that another "flew up in the air."2 Vierville was taken by 1100.
At the eastern end of Omaha Beach Frankford, Doyle, and Emmons were hitting hard at three exits while Baldwin blasted away at German guns near Port-en-Bessin. Baldwin was hit twice by light artillery, with no casualties. At 1043 McCook reported picking up a radio message saying that American troops were advancing. Harding was leading their way, dropping salvos up the draw toward Colleville. By 1600 St. Laurent-sur-Mer was occupied by 29th Division troops. Colleville was in a vice, set up by 1st Division troops approaching from two draws. The Germans here surrendered the next morning.
How this team of destroyers arrived at this particular place in history, and made the landings at Omaha Beach succeed, is the story to be told.>>
E.g., how many persons know about "Operation Cobra?" It was the first use of carpet bombing by medium and heavy bombers and it allowed the Americans, including Patton's Third Army, to break out from their Normandy beachhead. See post 19 here.
You realize that 90% of that post was wholly unnecessary, right? Cutting and pasting isn't the same as actually having a discussion, especially since almost none of it was germane to my point.
There is no empirical evidence on how many people have heard of Guadalcanal, but I guarantee you that if you took a survey, a great deal more would have heard of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, regardless of how much molecular-level detail they remember about those battles. And while they might not have heard of Operation Cobra, they've likely seen Patton and the resulting breakthrough and exploitation that resulted, whereas far fewer have seen Guadalcanal Diary and The Thin Red Line.
Side note: My uncle Mac was one of those Rangers on Pointe du Hoc. I've heard the account at every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.
Last edited by MinivanDriver; 03-08-2018 at 05:10 PM..
You realize that 90% of that post was wholly unnecessary, right? Cutting and pasting isn't the same as actually having a discussion, especially since almost none of it was germane to my point.
There is no empirical evidence on how many people have heard of Guadalcanal, but I guarantee you that if you took a survey, a great deal more would have heard of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, regardless of how much molecular-level detail they remember about those battles. And while they might not have heard of Operation Cobra, they've likely seen Patton and the resulting breakthrough and exploitation that resulted, whereas far fewer have seen Guadalcanal Diary and The Thin Red Line.
Side note: My uncle Mac was one of those Rangers on Pointe du Hoc. I've heard the account at every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.
You might be right. However, I come from a community where the Marines are the preferred branch of service for some reason, and the Pacific War was the topic of discussion more than the European Theater among WWII veterans.
Additionally, the Buckeye Division (37th Infantry Division) of the Ohio National Guard served in the Pacific theater during World War II. So perhaps your acquaintances talk more about Normandy, but that wasn't true in my experiences. I had a neighbor who fought at Iwo Jima.
The information that I provided was meant as much to inform readers as to win any argument. The oft-omitted role of the American destroyers on D-Day is something that always has bothered me. I've read interviews of German officers who served at Normandy on D-Day and they said the one thing they didn't anticipate was the decisive impact of naval artillery fire, perhaps not surprising from a nation with relatively little experience of naval gun support of amphibious landings.
My general opinion is that especially younger Americans know little about any American war, even WWII.
I've often asked 20-somethings if they knew who John Wayne was. The majority don't.
Did your uncle tell about finding the artillery pieces behind Pointe du Hoc and putting them out of action? If so, what did he think about "The Longest Day?"
You might be right. However, I come from a community where the Marines are the preferred branch of service for some reason, and the Pacific War was the topic of discussion more than the European Theater among WWII veterans.
Additionally, the Buckeye Division (37th Infantry Division) of the Ohio National Guard served in the Pacific theater during World War II. So perhaps your acquaintances talk more about Normandy, but that wasn't true in my experiences. I had a neighbor who fought at Iwo Jima.
The information that I provided was meant as much to inform readers as to win any argument. The oft-omitted role of the American destroyers on D-Day is something that always has bothered me. I've read interviews of German officers who served at Normandy on D-Day and they said the one thing they didn't anticipate was the decisive impact of naval artillery fire, perhaps not surprising from a nation with relatively little experience of naval gun support of amphibious landings.
My general opinion is that especially younger Americans know little about any American war, even WWII.
I've often asked 20-somethings if they knew who John Wayne was. The majority don't.
Did your uncle tell about finding the artillery pieces behind Pointe du Hoc and putting them out of action? If so, what did he think about "The Longest Day?"
He talked about it endlessly, including the artillery pieces. And he liked The Longest Day. "It's just a movie, not a history lesson," was his comment.
Not sure #2 is a valid criticism. Let generals dictate the war, and let politicians govern.
One of the key moments in the war was when Hitler began overruling his generals and making the decisions himself, many of which were catastrophic for Germany. FDR ont he other hand mainly focused on transforming US society into one that could support the war effort, and in this he succeeded.
How great of a commander-in-chief was FDR during World War II?
I think he was excellent in this capacity and deserves to be ranked as the second or third greatest American President largely because of it. '
However, having said that I'd like to discuss these criticisms of him in that role:
1. He consented to putting the Japanese Americans in internment camps.
2. He was very "hands off". The generals and the admirals were left to make most decisions on their own.
3. The decision that was made early on in the war to devote most resources to defeating Germany lead to a scarcity of a military forces and arms in the Pacific Theater. As a result, the invasion of Guadalcanal in late 1942 was conducted with inadequate men, ships, and airplanes. As a result, the campaign there went on for months. Should we have put more resources into the conflict in the Pacific early on than we chose too?
4. Should FDR have been honest with General MacArthur during the early part of the war and simply told him it would have been impossible to send more troops to the Philippines to relieve American forces there?
5. Was the Doolittle Raid on Japan that he ordered an unnecessary expenditure of good pilots and airplanes for little real purpose?
6. Was FDR wrong to insist on unconditional surrender from the Axis forces? Would drawing up specific surrender terms--no matter how harsh--been more to the advantage of the Allies in terms of ending World War II?
7. Was FDR too physically frail at the time of the Yalta Conference to properly represent the USA?
8. Did FDR not do enough as President to prevent or stop the Holocaust and other war-related atrocities by German and Japanese forces?
I would appreciate those commenting to offer background and explanations rather than just providing "yes" or "no" answers. Anyone can have an opinion. Let's see some reasoning.
1. Certainly, that's one where he could and should be faulted.
2. That one's a feature not a bug. Things work better when the military people actually conduct military operations without a lot of interference from the politicians. The decision to go to war and the goals of that war are decisions that rightfully fall upon the politicians. Beyond that, the day to day military operations should usually be done by generals.
3. Germany was the real threat. Germany had a greater population and industrial base than Japan. Japan was quite dependent on foreign imports of strategic materials. That flow could be cut off by naval action to a large degree. Germany also had the first buddings of a nuclear program, although it turned out that Hitler didn't think much of it and it did not get the resources it needed to succeed. Besides, while the Japanese were the ones who actually attacked the US, the US was at war all but in name with Germany well before the Pearl Harbor attack. The US was already devoting resources to the European theater; Pearl Harbor wasn't going to change that.
4. Possibly, but the end result would have been the same. The Phillipines were going to fall in the early stages of the war no matter what. Related to #2, though, MacArthur was the one who made the decision to keep troops there, not FDR. Would Mac have evacuated had he known he would not have been reinforced? Maybe, but possibly he might have tried to stay and fight it out.
5. Doolittle was effective at shaking the Japanese psyche out of their thinking that they were invincible and that the Americans were soft and did not have the guts to fight it out in the Pacific. It caused the Japanese to attempt to expand their security perimeter, exposing them to their disaster at Midway, which was a major turning point in the war.
6. Unconditional surrender did probably extend the war, but given the historical circumstances, it certainly was justified. WWI had just concluded three decades before. That was a monumental and disastrous war for all the European powers involved. The Germans felt that they were not truly defeated in this war, and that they were betrayed by their politicians. In some part, this led to the German aggression in WWII. Unconditional surrender was simply to assure that the Germans and Japanese would be truly defeated and that there would be no World War III started by either of them.
7. Maybe, but I'm not sure it mattered. The Red Army had already occupied most of Eastern Europe and no amount of talking or diplomacy was going to get Stalin to move it. Short of war vs. the Soviets, the fate of Eastern Europe was sealed well before Yalta.
8. I'm not sure that the full extent of the Holocaust was known to the US at any time where there was much that could have been done to stop it. So long as German territory was intact, what could have been done? By 1945, when the Allies began liberating the death camps, the victims had already mostly died.
No CIC is ever perfect. FDR certainly was not as he can certainly be criticized for the Japanese-American citizens' interment. Overall, though, it is hard to argue that he didn't do a good job.
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