http://help.evolutiiondesk.in/168/how-to-track-my-dads-location-through-gps…

He told me after I finished schoolwork ahead of all others of the story. He had been infantry when the war started, forced to the Penisula’s end and then slogged all the way forward to Chosun. There he was forced back to the area that eventually became the DMZ.

I respect him higher than most in this world, he was in the rearguard on the retreat and eventually in the nose of the attack, then rearguard again.

He is a strength to my memories which provides for me to this day.

I suspect that the dearth of US Army credit in the Pacific, much like the dearth of US Navy credit in the Italian and North African campaigns, is more due to military branch mythology than anything else — the Navy/Marines get the Pacific, the Army gets the European theater, and the Air Force gets a hand in both.

Amazing to think of the U.S. waging war in Europe and in the Pacific with such tremendous forces.

No grandpa? Photo album, and see if you can buttonhole one of the old soldiers at the end of the parade route.

Mew

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” — George Santayana

But the slugfest that occurred on some islands was fought chiefly by the army.

My wife’s father was a young B-24 pilot, flying hours upon hours out of England, (Mildenhall, I believe). He was similarly silent about it.

I would bet that is a pretty common thing–whatever else happened in WWII, the men who fought it were indeed MEN, who didn’t generally need to talk about what they had done. Audie Murphy was an anomaly, only in that we have heard his story, and he was the extreme case. But they all shared the conditions and the life, and many gave up theirs for ours. The ones who came home were glad to make it back; talking about it just didn’t seem necessary.

I’m thankful, though, for the ones who recorded the history of these battles. They give us the chance, even now, to reflect, and to send our love and respect to all of our fathers and grandfathers (and some mothers and grandmothers, too), even though they may have to receive it long-distance. It’s impossible to thank them enough.

There are people in the news today who should be ashamed of themselves.

The Pacific war was much more efficient than the war in Europe. We took island by island, very methodically.

Europe was messy and wasteful, by comparison.

Europe gave rise to the Air Force.

The Pacific war made the U.S. Navy the most powerful military force on the planet earth.

Germany had the same problem.

American pilots, on the other hand, came from population generally. We had, for all practical purposes, an unlimited supply line of pilots.

As a side note, Japanese carriers were not necessarily superior to US flat tops. The Japanese were good, but we were better.

Strategically, there was really no reason for the Japanese to even invest in occupying Midway. Contrary to “popular” belief, their reason for wanting Midway was not as a jumping off point for an invasion of the Hawaiian Islands. That would have been unwieldy at best, since Midway is over 1000 miles from Hawaii, trying to supply an invasion force, and eventually a garrison from that distance would have been tenuous at best. American subs still roamed far and wide in the Pacific. A submarine campaign against those supply lines would have wreaked havoc. Besides, Hawaii, esp Oahu had over 120,000 Army and Marine troops stationed there, along with tanks and aircraft. They would have roughly handled any invasion force.

The purpose of Midway was to draw out what was left of our Pacific fleet, so the Japanese could destroy it. Which would have left us with no choice but to close down the Pacific Theatre, until we gained the strength to take it back, which probably would not have been until late 1943. One has to remember, that at that time (June of 1942) our factories, ship yards, and armories were beginning to reach full capacity. New ships were on the building ways, either being laid down, or completed. Even if we were defeated at Midway, the final victory over Japan was kind of inevitable. It just would have taken a bit longer.

On the other, the U.S had such overwhelming military superiority in South Viet Nam, including total air superiority, that Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap’s vision of a popular uprising in the South was foolish and foolhardy.

The U.S. lost one carrier, 145 planes and 307 men. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, a heavy cruiser, 291 planes and 4,800 men, according to the U.S. Navy and to an account by former Japanese naval officers in “Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, the Japanese Navy’s Story.”

The defeat was so overwhelming that the Japanese navy kept the details a closely guarded secret and most Japanese never heard of the battle until after the war.

Nimitz got his intelligence from Showers and a few dozen others relentlessly analyzing Japanese code in the basement of a Pearl Harbor administrative building.

Japanese messages were written using 45,000 five-digit numbers representing phrases and words.

The cryptographers had to figure out what the numbers said without the aid of computers.

“In order to read the messages, we had to recover the meaning of each one of those code groups. The main story of our work was recovering code group meanings one-by-painful-one,” Showers said.

At the time of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, they understood a small fraction of the messages. By May 1942, they could make educated guesses.

A key breakthrough came when they determined that Japan was using the letters “AF” to refer to Midway.

Showers said Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, the team’s leader, and Nimitz were confident that the letters referred to the atoll. But Adm. Ernest King, the Navy’s top commander, wanted to be sure before he allowed Nimitz to send the precious few U.S. aircraft carriers out to battle.

So Nimitz had the patrol base at Midway send a message to Oahu saying the island’s distillation plant was down, and it urgently needed fresh water. Soon after, both an intelligence team in Australia and Rochefort’s unit picked up a Japanese message saying “AF” had a water shortage.

Showers was an ensign in the office, having just joined the Navy. He analyzed code deciphered by cryptographers, plotted ships on maps of the Pacific, and filed information.

Now 92 and living in Arlington, Va., the Iowa City, Iowa, native went on to a career in intelligence. He served on Nimitz’s staff on Guam toward the end of the war, and returned later to Pearl Harbor for stints leading the Pacific Fleet’s intelligence effort. After the Navy, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Showers said commanders weren’t always as open to using intelligence to plan their course of attack the way Nimitz was. Some were suspicious of it.

But Midway changed that.

“It used to be a lot of people thought intelligence was something mysterious and they didn’t believe in it and they didn’t have to pay attention to it. Admiral Nimitz was fortunately what we call intelligence-friendly,” Showers said.

Imagine what would have happened if Jamie Gorelick had been around then what with the let’s not share information mind-set.